Brittany Baptise is a nurse at the Scarborough General Hospital in Trinidad and Tobago, in the Caribbean. Today is her day off and she smiles as she describes how nervous she was when she learned that she would be working in an intensive care unit (ICU) to treat COVID-19 patients.

“It was a bit fearful because, coming from the medical ward, we don’t really knew the rules and function of an ICU. I had no formal training, I had little knowledge about how the ventilator works, the settings and these things.”

By the end of September 2020, Brittany was trained and working in the ICU with new skills and competencies to offer as part of an integrated team of health professionals. She was one of a cadre of 82 nurses across 7 Caribbean countries to take part in a 4-week training course to learn new skills and competencies to work in ICUs. These nurses are now making significant contributions to hospitals across the Caribbean providing critical care to COVID-19 patients.

This is crucial to the achievement of universal health coverage (UHC), which is dependent on a sufficient, equitably distributed and well-performing health workforce. The arrival of COVID-19 has severely challenged progress in this area. 

Nurses training  

©PAHO/WHO

Urgent need for critical care nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic

In March 2020, the Caribbean Region recorded its first imported case of COVID-19. By mid-March  2021, there had been more than 100,000 confirmed cases, and some 2,000  deaths across 20 countries in the Caribbean. The pandemic exposed a range of weaknesses in country health systems and the health workforce; a key problem   being a shortage of critical care nurses.

Registered nurses play an important role in the delivery of quality care to patients especially in the critical care environment. With the rising numbers of new COVID-19 infections and associated complications, nurses had to be prepared to function at a higher level within the critical care clinical environment.

However, Ministries of Health in the Caribbean were challenged with a shortage of properly trained critical care nurses. It was clear that the numbers, skills and capacities of these nurses required boosting.

Recognizing the urgent need, the University of West Indies School of Nursing, a PAHO/WHO Collaborating Centre for Nursing and Midwifery, developed a course to equip nurses with the right skills and competencies to provide critical nursing care in ICUs.

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