Q: What you were doing during the Ebola outbreak?

GS: I’m the president for the Liberian Nurses Association. During the Ebola crisis, we did training, did a lot of training for the nurses and for people in the community, teaching how do to handwashing, how to prepare handwashing fluid. We also did some triage training, in one of the counties, to help us to create a triaging unit.

Q: What did you learn through this crisis?

GS: If we had just sat down and we had done nothing, we wouldn’t have gotten anywhere. The community was complaining, “We don’t have this. We don’t have PPE [personal protective equipment]. We don’t have gloves.” You can’t tell somebody to “Wash these decks,” for instance, and you don’t give the person soap, you don’t give the person water. How will they wash it? So. We are the ones who try to fend for these people, who are actually in the field doing the work. If things are provided, people can be able to carry out the work. We were nursing leaders, nursing advocates.

Those are our responsibilities. But funding is a problem. We have no real source of funding from anywhere, besides what nurses pay for their membership. Whatever they pay for the membership card is our only source of funding, no other source, nobody else helping us with anything. We got to run this place with just that.

Q: What are you most proud of?

GS: Well—what makes me proud is we have chosen a profession, a profession where we save lives. When you have a patient who comes in very sick and you treat that patient and that patient can come through and walk out of the hospital, it’s a source of pride for you, that you have done something for that patient to recover.

Q: Today, now, in 2019, have you seen a change in how the health system supports nurses? Is there a change that you see? Has nursing changed?

GS: There should be shared standards for public and private facilities. Some of the private areas don’t want to send their staff for the trainings. The training will be there but they won’t send them. If we have trainings for everybody, it should be standard. It shouldn’t be something that, because it’s public, then it’s one and, because it’s private, it’s something else. The government needs to think on how they can standardize salaries as well. If you have a BSc degree in nursing—everybody who obtains that BSc should get that same kind of salary.

Nursing practices and precautions need to be standard as well. During Ebola, we had an IPC [infection protection and control] focal person in certain areas. Let that be a standard, so that people can continue to do it, even without the crisis, so that, when another crisis comes, you’ll already be prepared. Community engagement also needs to continue. The community is where people come from, before they come to the hospital. If you have things that were put into place during the crisis, they should continue to have them in place in preparation. Like handwashing.

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Gloria Stevens was interviewed for Frontline Nurses by Susan Michaels-Strasser on August 15, 2019 in Monrovia, Liberia.

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