Home nurses start the new year running

My community-focused friend and colleague, Dr Wendel Abel, was walking through Central Kingston the other day (as he often does to keep himself grounded) when he met Michelle Foster and they struck up a conversation.

It turned out that Foster was an unemployed but fully trained practical nurse. Always teeming with ideas, the quick-witted Abel suggested that she "make things happen this year" and "hit the ground running". Foster wasted no time and within a few days rounded up three other nursing colleagues who were her friends and school batchmates but similarly unemployed. So Foster along with Maurica Foster, Valerie Salmon and Elsa Johnson formed themselves into a visiting home-nursing unit - MMVE Home Nursing and are up and running.

Pow-wow sessions

I accidentally walked into the conference room at our private practice on the day they were in one of their strategising, pow-wow sessions, dressed in their sparkling white uniforms as professional nurses usually are, huddled around their 'instigator', Dr Abel. I was intrigued by the energy, warmth, focus and determination of the gathering and inserted myself into the group and began speaking to their articulate team leader, Foster.

"I just thought that Dr Abel's idea was brilliant. We are all used to being working women and, why not develop our own business instead of waiting for a job?" she said.

These practical nurses would be among the casualties of the ongoing recession, but now they are charting their own future. Foster explained that she has long been a community organiser and a strongly community-oriented person who was always interested in health issues. She said that as an inner-city citizen, her health concerns always focused on two major issues - educating the youth on HIV/AIDS and on human-rights issues that include those of homosexuals.

Human rights and HIV/AIDS

"Because of the stigma, a lot of these people go underground and don't get the help that is available to them, and they die before their time. For example, HIV/AIDS is now like a chronic disease, just like diabetes, but affected persons have to feel comfortable to seek the available assistance," she said.

The nurses in MMVE Home Nursing will take your call if you fall ill and need someone to take you to the hospital; if you or your child falls ill and you need health care at home; or need assistance to the hospital; they will care for you for the entire day or on an hourly basis. They say that their core values surround the concepts of 'punctual, honest, caring and professional'.

Services offered include home nursing, hospital care, geriatric care, wound care, diabetic care, paediatric care, psychiatric care, blood-sugar testing, blood-pressure monitoring and after-hospital care. The nurses at MMVE Home Nursing are waiting to be the best visiting nurses in town; contact them at 864-7562.

Eulalee Thompson is health editor and a professional counsellor; email: eulalee.thompson@gleanerjm.com.