Betty Bianca Long

Photo by: Dilip Singh

By Laura Dowrich-Phillips

Betty Bianca Long didn’t want to be a nurse. She entered the field on her mother’s coercion, viewing it only as a job. Fast forward 32 years later and Long is still a nurse, one who is now fiercely passionate about her profession.

“One patient turned me around. It was an old man on the septic ward. He had a very bad ulcer and as I tried to take off the bandage, he screamed and I stopped,” she explained.

“He thought I was being compassionate but I was horrified. He said he wished all the other nurses could see me doing his dressing because whenever he screamed, they didn’t stop. I said, ‘Betty, this is how you care for people: just pretend it’s your brother or sister lying there.”

Long, 54, said she grew to like nursing because she recognised it was all about giving the best service and care to patients.

That recognition is not evident in younger nurses in T&T, she said. “If all the old dinosaurs like me don’t stay and motivate the younger ones, how can we expect them to stay? What is the motivation if they don’t desperately love it?” she asked.

Long, a clinical nurse specialist in obstetrics, is particularly critical of nurses in her field of midwifery, where she said care is very important.

“I hear the conversations in taxis and maxis. Whenever I give workshops, I say it’s not about us. No nurse or midwife can survive without patients,” said the mother of two during a visit to T&T.

The level of care from a midwife can impact on the mortality rates of babies and mothers, said Long. It’s an issue with which she is familiar. Last May, she travelled to Sierra Leone, where she discovered that the country had the highest infant mortality rate in Africa.

“They’ve been ravaged by war for 12 years and the infrastructure is poor, mainly because health and sanitation are under one ministry, so funds have to be shared,” she explained.

Long was so moved by the situation that she chastised her travelling companion, a woman who was born in Sierra Leone but lived in the States for over 30 years, for not giving back to her country.

Together, they established a non-profit organisation called Sa Leone Health Pride. The organisation’s board of nine was installed on December 9 last year. Its goal is to help reduce infant and maternal mortality through education. The target people, Long said, are medical and nursing staff, particularly those responsible for care of high-risk patients.

Long said they staged obstetric conferences to find out exactly what were the needs of the medical fraternity and were surprised that what was needed was really basic items such as bandages.

Membership in Sa Leone is voluntary. Long said members donate time and money and she intends to visit once a year, then increase those visits to twice yearly. Apart from Sierra Leone, the organisation has extended its reach to other West African countries such as Monrovia, Liberia, Ghana, Nigeria and Guinea.

Long, who grew up in St James, and later moved to Malabar, Arima, said she intends to do similar work in the Caribbean as an independent consultant when she retires.

One of the challenges of doing that, specifically in T&T, is getting statistics.

“It is very hard to get mortality statistics here. Everyone keeps information close to their chests. It’s difficult to come here to do lectures and be quoting US figures. We need to move on and grow,” said Long, who conducts workshops for midwives locally, also donates books and CD roms to the School of Nursing library.

Like her entry in nursing, Long was steered in the direction of midwifery, this time by a ward sister at the Port-of-Spain General Hospital.

Long, who was happy working in orthopaedics, said the ward sister “tortured” her to study midwifery, since it was a requirement for promotion to ward sister.

“The day I walked into midwifery, I was sold on it,” she said.

Long migrated in 1980 to study and in three years, while working full-time, completed a bachelor of science in nursing and master’s in public health, with a concentration in International Maternal Child Health, at Columbia University, New York City.

She has been working for the last 17 years as a perinatal nurse at the Columbia University Medical Center. Long is currently a clinical nurse specialist in obstetrics and also lectures as an adjunct assistant professor at Pace and Long Island Universities.

In April last year, she received the Johnson and Johnson’s fourth annual Childbirth Nursing Award from the Association of Women’s Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses. The award was created to recognise and honour the dedication and skill of childbirth nurses and to promote excellence in practice.

That Long was the recipient of this award is no surprise. She is a strong advocate of standards in the profession.

She is very critical of the local system, which she said, continues to promote older nurses and gives them educational opportunities over younger ones.

“How will we sustain quality care with good transition if the young nurses aren’t afforded the chance to get an education?

“Too often, we take models from abroad wholesale. Models in terms of promotional structure. We need to find the right mix between merit and seniority.

“Find the best system that works for us,” she said.