Gwendolin Tross has survived cancer four times, the most recent being last year, but as painful as those diagnoses and follow-up treatments have been, a continuous ache for this 81-year-old retiree is the state of nursing in Guyana.
Tross, who could be described as coming from the ‘old school,’ gave all of her professional life to nursing education, both locally and overseas, and is credited for developing the curriculum for the nursing degree at the University of Guyana.
Now that she has retired and lives a quiet life in her Lamaha Gardens home with her husband Samuel Tross, she is unhappy with what passes for the nursing profession in Guyana and for her the blame does not fall in one place. It has to do with the policymakers, but also the nurses themselves, who seem afraid to mobilize and collectively push for better and also the manner in which some of them treat their patients.