The assistant-nurses

The assistant-nurses are the hearth of care in a hospice. The job is particularly thankless: they change pampers, prepare dead bodies for funerals, wash vomit, manage confused and aggressive mentally sick patients, clean wounds of pus and blood, deal with dangerous contagious diseases (tuberculosis, … not to forget AIDS itself...). Just to go into the wards full of microbes is enough to make you feel tired, before even starting work

We have a team of 10 assistant nurses to take care of 70 dying! They are tired. Most work without social security 12 hours per day with only 1 day off per week. They receive less money and less respect than workers in an office because they are considered less qualified. Of course the productivity is low. A few exceptional girls are wasting their health…

If I speak about that with them, they say they can't work less because they need money. One must sustain her family, another would like to get involved later in complementary studies, the third thinks about the future of her baby. They all try to reach the doorstep of the six thousand five hundred baht end of the month.

If I speak about that with the manager, he explains to me that the hospice really doesn't have the choice: the staff are paid as other workers of the same level in the country and they have some advantage by grants in nature. The hospice cannot offer true social security in the way the state can.

In practice it means merely that there are not enough candidates for this kind of work.

We absolutely need a new kind of donor. His mission will be thankless and won't leave traces engraved in a wall: to find and to offer a team of ten extra assistant-nurses paid by him 6500 baht per month for a forty working hour week. It's not just money that is required, but a team of people! That donor will also have to give a supplement for existing helps-nurses so they can also receive the same 6500 baht when "only" working 8 hours not 12 hours a day in such hell!

I would like it so much that it would be possible one day to say sometimes to a worker with difficult menstruation: "Today is off; you should rest to be strong enough to fight the microbes of the ward".
I would like that it could be possible to give a week off to assistant-nurses accidentally injured with infected needle (and that they are obliged to take heavy preventive therapies 28 days) without obliging other workers to make up their lost hours. Such accidents are almost inevitable when one is so overworked
In the new conditions improved efficiency could be expected.

(NB This text is from 2002... Since 2004 there are some students who help the team)