Nursing in Nairobi, Kenya
2020 is the Year of the Nurse and the Midwife.
As a child, Alice Shiundu remembers going to hospitals with her mother and admiring the white uniforms and caps they wore. Her mother would address them as “Mother Teresa”, the name the Luhya people gave to nurses. Alice told her mother that she too wanted to be “Om Teresa” when she grew up. She’s worked as a nurse for more than 25 years now and is currently a nurse manager at a busy centre in Nairobi.
It’s a big management job (the centre sees more than 3,000 people a day) and the days are long: she starts at 6.30 in the morning and finishes at 8pm at night. Alice supervises 150 staff, and is responsible for budgeting and procurement.
Alice sorts out problems, responds to complaints (and compliments), and deals with correspondence. She spends a fair amount of time in meetings — as well as walking round to make sure that everything is going smoothly — for the staff and the patients.
Sarah Wambui Chege works with Alice as a nurse-midwife. She is proud of the progress they are making on “primary care nursing”. “This means the patient is assigned one nurse or doctor who will follow them and care for them throughout. The patients are able to ask questions directly to their nurse or doctor or midwife, which has helped the flow of work.”
Sarah is fully trained in Emergency Obstetric Care and now herself trains doctor interns and student nurses. She says: “I love the good outcome when I work with a mother, monitor her labour, deliver her a healthy baby and she goes home happy with no complications. Seeing a mother go home safely with her baby, that makes me the happiest person.”
Alice and Sarah are both very conscious of the need for resources, including having enough staff and beds. “The willpower is there to do your best to do the right procedures but sometimes the challenge is that there are no resources. This may compromise the quality of work that you are doing.” Sadly, “If a nurse can’t provide something a customer needs, the nurse gets the blame. This can be very demotivating.”
Both women place a high value on qualifications. Sarah says that “To be where I want to be, I would need to upgrade in learning and get advanced degrees in midwifery.” Alice is working towards a PhD: She also wants to see more nurses getting better qualifications. “I want to see a dynamic nursing profession where we can have many nurses with PhDs or master’s degrees, where we can also have our own nurse in Parliament fighting for the rights of nurses and the rights of health services in our country.”
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