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Tonight, the nursing profession is demanding that the Ministries of Health and the Public Service take swift action to appoint a new Deputy Director of Health Services. 

This post is important to them because the Deputy Director of Health Services is also the Chief Nursing Officer. The holders of this post act as the advocate for the nursing profession, and whatever concerns they have about the improvement of the profession. Usually, a senior member of the nursing profession fills the post, but the former Chief Nursing Officer is exiting before any succession plan could be put in place. 

It now falls to the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Public Service, and practitioners of the nursing profession to find a replacement. And, depending on who you ask, neither of the 3 groups are accepting blame for the delay. 

So now, the Nursing Taskforce, set up to address the issue, is calling for the situation to be resolved urgently. This morning, we got a chance to speak with House Speaker Laura Tucker-Longsworth, who is a member of the Task Force, and she put the issue into perspective:

Hon. Laura Tucker-Longsworth - Chair, NAC
"The office of the Deputy Director of Health Services who is also the Chief Nursing Officer, we call her our chief nurse, that is a very critical chair and I think that the problem was we brought it to the attention that they had not been succession planning, they had failed to put the necessary structure and public service regulations tell you that for somebody to be appointed as the chief nurse, they have to have been like an assistant nurse or being in that position as assistant for a number of years and so that was not done and so there is massive confusion. In any event we addressed it, the problem is that we had not heard anything from the ministry, we had not gotten a response and then the time has approaching and the chief nurse was told that she would just go off on her leave and hand over the chair to a physician who would be the Director of Health Services. That's a no-no for nursing, nurses are nursing, our leaders are nursing, if you're handing over, you hand over to another nurse and there are issues with that in essence because it shows you clearly, that the nursing workforce, the guidance is not being adhered to. We need to recall that nurses are the biggest numbers of personnel in the health care delivery service in Belize. We are meeting shortly and we received some updates last night and I can't comment on those updates because then we're meeting to discuss those but I think that there may be some resolution to the issue, but we'll discuss it with the nurses and see how they feel about it."