BASSETERRE, St. Kitts – FORMER Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition, the Rt. Hon. Dr. Denzil Douglas said his Labour Party Government had never recruited nurses from Africa or the Caribbean, and claimed that Junior Health Minister Senator Wendy Phipps had made a false statement in her recent address to the nation on the recruitment of nurses from the Philippines.
Following a leaked Ministry of Health letter concerning the recruitment of 17 nurses from the Philippines, Senator Phipps sought to bring lucidity to the issue which had dominated the airwaves and social media with pointed fingers.
The Junior Health Minister chose to do so in a nationwide address on Tuesday (Nov. 29) in which she said: “The Federal Government considered it rather unfortunate that so much time and energy has been consumed with this issue of foreign nurses’ recruitment that has for the most part being deliberately and hypocritically slanted to achieve political advantage and disgruntlement.”
She also said this is not the first time that the Government of St. Kitts and Nevis had recruited nurses from overseas, while listing a number of countries from which nurses were brought by the former Administration.
“To be precise, Government has been in the habit of recruiting nurses for years. In the past five years alone, starting in 2011 during the former Labour Administration, a total of 27 foreign nurses have been hired. These nurses were recruited from countries such as Nigeria, the USA, Cuba, Taiwan, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Guyana, Santo Domingo and the Philippines.”
In response, Dr. Douglas, while a guest on Freedom FM’s ‘Issuers’ programme last Wednesday, declared that his Administration had “never imported or recruited any nurse from Africa, from Jamaica, from Guyana, Jamaica or any other Caribbean country except Cuba, and we also recruited nurses recently from the Philippines”.
Indicating his reason for making that statement, the Opposition Leader said: “I say it because when I was there as Head of Government, we took a decision in CARICOM not to recruit our own nurses from around the Caribbean region. Only if there was an excess of nurses in those territories in the Caribbean, we would recruit nurses from there. None was recruited by us from around the Caribbean region.
“We had St. Vincent and the Grenadines who took on the responsibility, Prime Minister Gonsalves who said, ‘I will train extra nurses for the Caribbean region and beyond.’ And as a result of that he undertook that particular assignment. When we realized that we were severely short in all our territories in CARICOM, Cuba came to our rescue. And so a large number of our nurses, 40 of them went off to Cuba to be trained in Community Nursing. We never recruited anyone from around the Caribbean, Africa or Guyana.”
He stated that when the Labour Administration had commissioned the Haemodialysis Unit at the Joseph N France General Hospital, they were sensible enough to recruit three Pilipino nurses and two Cuban nurses over a period of four years.
“Regarding the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), we had a number of local nurses trained for ICU service. Some of them have retired and, as a result of that, we again sent off to the Philippines and recruited two more nurses to come here to work in the ICU,” said Dr. Douglas who re-emphasized that the Administration that he led “never competed with any Caribbean country for their nurses, they never recruited nurses from Africa and they never recruited any nurse from Guyana”.
The former Prime Minister however pointed out that a number of females had migrated along with their husbands to the Federation and had sought jobs as nurses.
“I must point out that a number of persons had migrated to St. Kitts, they took up residence in St. Kitts with their husbands and with their families. They having been here and not recruited by us, applied to the Ministry of Health for nursing jobs. They were screened, their credentials checked, seemed to be correct and accurate and professionally trained, and then they were employed.
