Nurses and midwives strategise towards COVID-19 contingency work plan
The Nursing and Midwifery Council (N&MC) in Ghana, on Tuesday, met with the core leadership of its stakeholder institutions to strategies towards a COVID-19 contingency Work Plan for the nursing and midwifery workforce.
They pledged their solidarity with its members and other frontline workers expressing gratitude to them for their dedication to duty in the face of the challenging global pandemic.
Mrs Eva Mensah, the Director of Nursing and Midwifery Services, Ghana Health Service, in a brief message on behalf of the other member institutions, urged the nursing and midwifery professionals to stick to the three basic principles of their profession, as proposed by Fuerst and Wolf, as a critical strategy towards the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.
These principles, she said, involved the realisation of “Man, as an Organism, Man, as a unique being, and Man, and his environment”.
Mrs Mensah urged practitioners to address environmental health issues in a variety of ways including social, biological and physical to appreciate the fact that man had influence on the environment and vice versa.
“As man relates to the environment, he needs to be protected from the aspects that case illness”, saying, the environment, therefore, needs to be considered as an essential part of nursing with respect to patient safety.
Mrs Mansah said the nurse and the midwife needed to consider these principles in the plan of nursing care for individual patients and clients from the “Pre-Triage, to the triage”, the holding, the quarantine and the isolation period.
She said key to the success of nursing care was the strict adherence to Universal Precautions particularly for airborne and droplet infections.
She urged all nurses and midwives to adhere to precautionary measures conveyed by the President of Ghana, to keep themselves and other families healthy, to achieve quality care.
“Ghana needs your services and we need you to be brave as our mother of nursing ‘Florence Nightingale’ in the fight against the COVID-19”, she said.
Reverend Veronica Darko, the Chairperson of the 14th Governing Board of the N&MC, recounted how the year 2020 had started with a positive outlook and great plans and hope, until the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has had a significant effect on several aspects of human lives globally.
Rev. Darko said “this is where our support and our call to duty should be displayed with all the braveness it deserves”, saying “We are soldiers in this fight against the virus, and to achieve this we need to strategise and collaborate with other members of the health team”.
She called on Ghanaians to support efforts being made to curb the spread of the virus, encourage and stand in solidarity with all nurses and midwives globally by donating to complement other efforts for the safety of both healthcare professionals and their patients.
Source: GNA