Shonette Francis, a nurse at the Kumaka District Hospital, is one of several assigned to taking care of isolated COVID patients in the Moruca sub district of Region One. Of the four years she has been in the profession, this year has been the toughest so far, but she is no quitter.
The hospital, she disclosed, is already understaffed so when it was asked which nurses would work with COVID patients, only a few nurses responded to the call. Francis said that although they were given a choice, she felt as though she had no option, being one of the few nurses who hadn’t a family to take care of. She admitted that although she was worried for her own safety, she accepted the new challenge.
“Each day we do rounds. We have patients that need to be monitored around the clock, sometimes we go out into the field to do testing and sometimes we go out to extract patients who have tested positive for COVID,” shared the nurse of some of her duties since the onset of the pandemic. Whenever, a patient becomes critical, the nurse on duty is expected to work a twenty-four-hour shift because of the shortage of staff. Francis shared that until the pandemic, she has never been in a situation where she was required to work round-the-clock.