150 Nurses from Ghana Arrive in Barbados to Address Staffing Shortages at Queen Elizabeth Hospital

More than 150 nurses from Ghana arrived on the island on Sunday to assist in dealing with some of the staffing headaches being faced by the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH).

Speaking to the media at the Grantley Adams International Airport after welcoming the delegation — that included Adelaide Ntim Ghana’s Deputy Health Minister — to Barbados, Minister of Health and Wellness, Senior Minister Jerome Walcott said some will be placed at the QEH to fill posts in the Accident and Emergency, Intensive Care, Surgical, Dialysis, and other departments.

“The Ministry of Health and Wellness is also benefiting. We have nurses going to the QEH for the various specific specialities, accident and emergency theatre, cardiac-trained nurses, and other areas. In the case of the Ministry of Health, we were concerned about nurses [and] midwives, certainly the area of psychiatry with the focus on mental health.

“We have a number of nurses who are trained psychiatric nurses, and this was an area where we were suffering for a dearth of trained psychiatric nurses in Barbados. We have nurses also who will be working in the polyclinics deployed in primary health. I gather that we have some nurse practitioners in this group who are here. We are looking for these nurses to help improve the overall delivery of our health care, not only in the QEH but indeed in the rest of the system, both in geriatrics, the primary health-care system, and the psychiatric department,” Walcott told journalists.

This is the third cohort of nurses from Ghana, the first coming to the island in the midst of COVID in June 2020. (RG)