Lolita Rebeiro, the country’s Chief Medex, lost her battle to cancer on Tuesday evening.
She was 45 and a mother of one.
The Ministry of Health, in a statement expressing sympathy to Rebeiro’s family and friends, noted that she was appointed Chief Medex in 2016. It said the late medex, who hailed from Region One, Barima-Waini, served the health sector for over 25 years after beginning her career as a nurse.
She later succeeded in the Medex training programme. Outside of her daily administrative functions, during her stint as Chief Medex, she organised and executed a number of medical outreach programmes across the coastland and hinterland regions of Guyana, the statement said.
“Medex Rebeiro was thoughtful and generous and the Ministry of Health has indeed lost a great soul. Her big personality will live on in our memories and we will truly miss seeing her at the office. We pray that her family finds the strength to cope during this difficult time,” the ministry’s statement added.
In an interview with this newspaper in January, Rebeiro had shared that in April last year, shortly after she tested positive for COVID-19, she was diagnosed with cancer. She was treated locally and completed treatment in Suriname at the start of last December. “I haven’t been cleared as yet by the doctors. However, it’s back to work for me,” she had said at the time.
She had related how she had dreamt of becoming a nurse and working at the Kumaka District Hospital in her home village of Santa Rosa in the Moruca Sub-Region. It was a dream she realised and then some.
The seventh of 13 children, Rebeiro had shared that her mother, the late teacher Rita Rebeiro, tried to dissuade her from pursuing her dreams because of the fear that she could have come into contact with persons living with HIV/AIDS and become infected. At the time, HIV/AIDS had been making the headlines.
Rebeiro started the professional nursing programme in September 1995, immediately after obtaining her CSEC results. “I had many challenges, financial and what’s not. To be honest, some mornings I went to school without breakfast. It was my brother Lovell, who was at the University of Guyana, and I—both of us were teenagers trying to make it on our own in town. At that time, we rented a small apartment in Cummings Lodge. We slept on one bed. Imagine two young adults, brother and sister, sleeping on one bed, head and tail, but we were committed and we made it,” she shared during the January interview.
On the completion of training in 1999, Rebeiro said she was assigned to the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC). In 2003, at her request, she was transferred to the Kumaka District Hospital (KDH) in Santa Rosa, Moruca. At KDH, she said she saw the need for another Medical Extension Officer (Medex). “I wanted to do more for our people. There was one medex serving a large population. There was no doctor.” She worked for a year and nine months and successfully applied to do the Medex training programme, which began in September 2004.
She recalled returning to work at KDH in September 2006 as a medex, she was eager to work along with the late Medex Lexus Jose to improve the health situation in the sub-region. But shortly after he unfortunately died by suicide.
“His death by suicide was very heartrending. I was still new on the job. I was left alone. I worked from January 2007 to 2009 by myself on duty, ’round-the-clock without any on-call allowance and without any overtime. Just a flat salary. When patients came at nights, I had to get up. I had a midwife and a nursing assistant for a very large population. I was responsible for KDH and at the same time supervising 18 other health facilities, including two health centres and 16 health posts, she had said.
She applied and was successful for the Chief Medex position in January of 2016.
“In Georgetown it was a challenge for me. I was used to clinical work and not to the administrative side of things. When I took over there was no Chief Medex to hand over. Prior to my appointment, the ministry had been without a Chief Medex for three years. I studied my job description and worked with that, doing research and going into files and cabinets to obtain information. There was no database on the medexes who were across the country.
She continued, “Just getting information about the medexes and the community health workers in the regions was a challenge. Creating a database for them took me about a year as information from far-flung areas trickled in. They had been operating under the supervision of the regional health officers.”
