The nurses’ pledge; any significance? (Feature)

AS part of the opening of the 12th biennial national delegates' conference and launch of a golden jubilee anniversary of the Ghana Registered Nurses Association (GRNA) in Accra on Thursday, October 29, a large number of smartly dressed nurses were made to recite a pledge.
Although that was not the first time I was listening to the nurses' pledge, this time round, I took particular interest in the content of the pledge
Looking all hearty and in high spirit, the nurses recited the pledge which reads:
“I acknowledge that the special training I have received has prepared me as a responsible member of the community.
I promise to care for the sick with all the skill I possess, no matter what their race, creed, colour, politics, or social status, sparing no effort to conserve life, alleviate pain and promote health.
I promise to respect at all times the dignity of the patient in my charge.
I promise to hold in confidence all personal information entrusted to me.
I promise to keep my knowledge and skill at the professional level and to give the highest standard of nursing care to my patients.
I promise to carry out intelligently and loyally medical instructions given to me.
I promise that my personal life shall at all times bring credit to my profession.
I promise to share in the responsibility of other professionals and citizens for promoting health locally, nationally and internationally.
So help me God”.
As they solemnly recited these words, I asked myself how many of the nurses present at the ceremony attached any significance to the words in the pledge? The reason for that question was because the word 'promise' run through almost all the lines of the pledge.
A Collins Cobuild Advanced Learner's English Dictionary I laid my hands on defined a promise as “a statement which you make to a person in which you say that you will definitely do something or give him something”. In the same dictionary, a pledge is explained to mean a serious promise made to somebody.
At this juncture, anybody who is conversant with activities in our health facilities will understand why I took interest in the nurses' pledge.
Day in day out, people who visit our health facilities, especially the public ones come with complaints of impatience, disrespect and sometimes plain insults from some of our nurses. The most affected are those insured under the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) who often complain through letters to the editor and phone calls to radio stations. What they usually complain about is the long time they spend at the Out-Patients Department (OPD) and how their complaints attract insults from some nurses, no matter their condition .
That is not to say there are no good nurses in our country; far from that. There abound in our midst very good ones. Those are the ones who receive the sick and the wounded with open arms, soothe their pains, comfort them and nurse them back to life. They love their job no matter the odds and make efforts to put aside the frustrations they face as nurses in developing countries and perform perfectly well for the sake of mankind.
In the same breath, there are very bad nurses. These are so bad that some people prefer to engage in self medication instead of facing them in the hospitals. They constantly frown and scream at the sick at the least provocation. To them, the sick deserve no respect and no matter their ages, they are to be treated anyhow unless they are ready to part with some cedis in some cases.
Addressing the participants at the GRNA’s conference, a lecturer at the Central University College, Mrs Jane Aba Mansa Okra, said all over the world, nurses are the key to health care delivery.
On the theme: “Nurses, Meeting Communities’ Expectation with Passion Through Innovations”, Mrs Okra, who is also a nurse , defined passion as “an intense overpowering emotions or eagerness; outreaching of the mind towards some special object. She explained that was what nursing was about and that was the spirit which propelled the founders of nursing to leave their comfort zones to bring life back to dying souls.
To her, nursing had changed its original meaning. She therefore took the opportunity to appeal to her colleagues to see the conference theme as a wake up call.
“We seem to have forgotten our mandate. But when we chose nursing as a profession, we decided on life that is dedicated to selfless service to others. Our profession is one of service and we all knew from the beginning. There is great significance found in serving others. When you give, you get so much back. Our profession is service driven; we serve others, including our patients, their families and communities”, she pointed out.
For her part,the President of the GRNA, Mrs Alice D. Asare-Allotey, hit the nail right on the head when she said in spite of a number of innovations the health sector had introduced to improve health care, most of their clients and patients seemed dissatisfied with the care that nurses gave them.
She went on to state that “the question most people ask these days, including me, is what has become of basic nursing care? Is it so hard for us to put ourselves in the place of a patient or a family member? Is poor basic nursing care not perhaps one of the reasons why family members constantly want to see whether their patient is fine? Perhaps they do not trust our nursing care and in this pursuit, they make a nuisance of themselves?”
Mrs Asare-Allotey went further to ask if “patients are destined to get more critically ill in hospitals, contracting airborne diseases, urinary tract infection or any other infection just because we have become so negligent and desensitised as to what basic human needs entail, for example care, comfort, a clean mouth and body, warmth, physical and emotional respect and dignity among others”.
Coming from people who themselves are nurses, one could expect that those few nurses who have made people to have a negative impression about the profession and the people in it would change for the better for benefit of all of us.
It is also worthy to note that the problem does not lie with nurses alone but other health workers.
In a recent article to the Health Page of the Daily Graphic, Dr Maxwell Osei-Ampofo of the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital in Kumasi, wrote that a “Critical observation had revealed that only a small percentage of health care workers at health institutions actually stay at work and do what they are paid to do.
“My enquiries revealed that these few are either God fearing, self actualised, patriotic or are nearing their grave and would want to do some right before exiting”.
He went on to state that among the majority, his searchlight caught people who were lazy, de-motivated, and incompetent and those who were just greedy.
These , according to Dr Osei-Ampofo, were the ones who would be seen reading all the newspapers on the stand at the work place, tuning in from one radio of television station to the other, talking on end on the mobile phone or land line, always late for their shift, yelling at patients and relatives, taking twice the time for an activity which otherwise should have been completed in a twinkling of an eye, as well as those who spend a maximum of one hour at the public health institutions and the rest of their time at their “locums”.
After touching on what the government on its part failed to do for health workers which to some extent demotivated them, Dr Osei-Ampofo went on to advise all to build a system that works and which all will have confidence in “because who knows who would have the next heart attack? Or who knows whose mother, wife, sister, aunt or daughter will need blood from an empty blood bank after child birth? Or who would be involved in the next car crash or thermal burns?”
Next time our nurses meet and decide to say their pledge, it will be better if each one of them takes his or her time to digest the words and allow them to sink. Who knows, that might help to change the minds and attitudes of those who became nurses by accident.