The Nursing Profession and Quackery in Nigeria

The sacrosanctity of the human life is such that to touch it, you must appear with Holy hands. Such hands must have been scrutinized before the professional sanctification. The prospective nurse must pass through the test tube of nurture, and even emotional torture sometimes before s/he is finally launched into the ethereal and angelic world of Nursing. This is a truism, because there is no product without an attendant process. Therefore, to put on a white garment like a hungry prophetess on fast, or to wear a dangling stethoscope like a helpless goat ready to be sold in Ortese market does not make one a nurse. The hood does not make a nun, neither does the Roman collar make a priest. In Nigeria where the movie industries and bad governance are creating false impression of some professions, to ignore hammering on the ideal, other than the reality is just but a prodigious step of sending a nation into ablaze. The death of a nurse is the death of many a people at home and on the sick bed. In Nigeria, doctors are the heads of a hospital. They are always in charge. They give orders and it is followed sheepishly. However, nurses are the hearts of a hospital. They cease to pump blood (love), the body (hospital/patients) die of anemia. Nurses are nearer to patients as doctors are nearer to their offices. This is why they’re trained on how to manage a man who raises his hand on their chin. They love to the heavens because they’re mystic angels sent by God to salvage the sick humanity. They do this because they’re demigods who share in the creative and curative powers of the Creator. Inasmuch as I personally consider my profession a vocation, I must never mince words to remind the general public that it is also a profession that is chiefly regulated by the Nursing and Midwifery Council of Nigeria. Even in the sense of being a vocation, one must be called by another and not by himself. That “another” is the regulatory body that hitherto commends, recommends and licenses one with a valid certificate and a sacred hand to move into the emaciating society and add flesh to fleshless bodies, add life to lifeless souls and further breathe airs of humanness and aromas of humaneness into the nostrils of a sick man. The sick eventually get healed by the sight of a nurse, even before the touch of his hand. Florence Nightingale was acclaimed a sliding angel with eternal verities. With her little lamp gliding through every corridor, healing with a therapeutic voice and a romantic hand, the Crimean soldiers were brought back to life again. Born from a noble family and turning down the hands of affluent suitors, she committed her life, like Mother Theresa of Calcutta to the service of humanity. This is the standard she laid which the nobility of the profession must be built upon and not below. Beware of this kind of beings sent from the celestial abode and those sent from the eternal hades of doom calculated by humanity to send many into their early grave. Make sure you’re in the hands of a trained and licensed nurse, not a tutored and privately recognized nurse who has her needle before the rationale.