By ANNELIA NIXON

Tribune Business Reporter

anixon@tribunemedia.net

The Bahamas Nurses Union’s (BNU) president yesterday challenged whether there will be enough trained medical staff to cover New Providence’s new $267m hospital and all other facilities.

Muriel Lightbourn, pointing to present shortages, said that The Bahamas does not have enough nurses to service three hospitals - Princess Margaret in Nassau, the Rand Memorial in Freeport and the proposed Perpall Tract facility - plus the numerous health clinics throughout the islands.

She added that The Bahamas needs more trained pediatric nurses and midwives, in particular, to ensure New Providence’s proposed specialist hospital, which will offer maternal, paediatric and adolescent services, can run efficiently and effectively.

The union president, voicing hope that the Government’s 2025-206 Budget includes funding for the recruitment of more specialised nurses, said The Bahamas also has to address the deterioration in its existing healthcare infrastructure and funding challenges for the union to welcome the new hospital.

“Let me speak from the nurses’ point of view,” Ms Lightbourn said. “We don’t have sufficient nurses to attend to the hospitals that we have presently, along with the over 70 clinics that we have throughout The Bahamas. We don’t have sufficient nurses to deal with that.

“You’re talking about a new hospital with over 300 beds. Where are you going to find the staff to put in those things? When our people have something in their mind, we tend to do what we have in our mind to do. But I think that I would welcome it.... Nurses would welcome a new hospital if what we have now was conducive to what we need to do.

“Even with the new hospital, it’s a specialty hospital. That means we need to train more persons, our nurses, in a specialty. When we going to do it? We going to wait until the hospital is built and then train them? We just got to have some succession plan in mind,” she added.

“How many pediatric nurses? We have trained nurses. We have midwives trained. But even with the amount of midwives we train it’s still not sufficient. We short on midwives. Midwives need to be all over and our Family Islands. We don’t have them. 

“And so you’re building a new hospital for that particular reason; you need the midwives,” Ms Lightbourn continued. “When we talk about it, I’d like to see what their plans are. I’d like to see what they plan in terms of training, so when this hospital is completed you have a cadre of certified midwives, you have a cadre of certified pediatric nurses, all those things.

“So I feel like if you’re going to do that, make sure you have these things. Please don’t scramble after you done build a pretty hospital or state-of-the-art hospital. Don’t scramble then. Make sure these things are in place. That’s what we need to do.”

Ms Lightbourn stressed the importance of maintaining PMH and other healthcare facilities whose conditions are less than optimal for both patients and staff. She said The Bahamas needs to have a plan to not only maintain healthcare facilities currently in use but the new hospital as well.

“The thing about it is, the new hospital, we could say we welcome it,” Ms Lightbourn added. “You can welcome it if the state of our present hospitals was in the condition that would be suitable for rendering the kind of care and service that you would like to render to our citizens.

“When we look at the new hospital, it is designed primarily for a specific group of persons. It’s for maternity and and pediatrics. But we still have a hospital that is in not in the best condition, that deals with the populace. Those same persons that we are talking about that this hospital would serve, they are presently still getting service in the hospital that we presently have that is not in a good condition. 

“My thing is why are we not improving what we have? We have spent thousands of dollars, and for years they’ve been talking about renovating these hospitals. I mean, nothing is happening. We have hospitals in Grand Bahama. We have the SRC (Sandilands Rehabilitation Centre). These hospitals service all of our people. They’re not in the condition that they need to be in, and so we need to fix that.

On top of that, we have clinics, over 70 clinics throughout this Bahamas that deal with those specific category of persons as well. Fix them. Would I welcome a new hospital? Yes, I would. But what about the ones that we have here now? What about those things? I welcome it, as long as we have a plan moving forward, not just for building it, [but also] maintaining it and making sure that it gives the populous the best care that we can get from it.”