NURSES URGED TO BE GUIDED BY CODE OF ETHICS (PAGE 20)

THE Nurses and Midwifery Council has been urged to be guided by their code of ethics to enable it to erase the negative public perception about its members.
The African Representative for ICM/UNFPA Project, Dr Jemima Dennis-Antwi, who made the call in Takoradi, advised her colleagues, “We must all join hands to address this challenge to redeem the public image of nurses and midwives.”
Dr Dennis-Antwi was speaking at the seventh biennial general meeting of the Ghana Registered Midwives Association (GRMA) on the theme: “Achieving Millennium Development Goals 4,5 and 6; The Role of the Midwife.”
She said, they could portray a good image of themselves when nurses and midwives changed their attitudes to work by relating cordially with their clients.
She said “The continuous public outcry about the attitude of nurses and midwives towards patients had created negative publicity for the profession. “The bad publicity we are receiving is gradually sweeping under the carpet all our good works”, Dr Dennis-Antwi stressed.
Dr Dennis-Antwi said with self examination, ethics would become more recognised because of its great naturalness since it constituted the foundation for true humanism towards which nurses and midwives must strive if they really wanted the culture of the profession to be truly ethical.
Dr Dennis-Antwi said through midwives, pregnant women could get access to adequate information and support the control of their reproductive health.
She said the work of midwives and nurses was very important to communities by the adoption of culturally sensitive approaches that allowed them to apply their basic knowledge of child bearing practices of women to build the needed community trust.
For his part, the Minister of Health, Dr George Sipa Yankey, commended members of the GRMA for their service to God and country.
He said his ministry would do everything possible to ensure that the needed environment was created for the achievement of the MDGs.
There were solidarity messages from the Ghana Medical Association (GMA) and other players in the medical fraternity.