Kebohula retires after 30years

ISAAC PINIELO
Correspondent | Monday March 29, 2010 00:00

She is also the first nurse to specialise in Accident and Emergency in Botswana and she was among the first nurses to work at Nyangabgwe Referral Hospital when it was first opened in 1988. Undoubtedly, she is the only accident and emergency nurse in charge at the Francistown-based hospital.

Now that she will be retiring at the end of this month after 30 years of service, she may be  most probably the first Motswana nurse to be loyal to the country's health system for such a long time.

Despite the fact that she retires at a time when the hospital has not identified anyone to fill her position, Kebohula said she is leaving a happy woman.

The 56 year-old mother of two said that during her 30 years as a nurse she has contributed immensely to the improvement of the health system in this country. She says she started working as a registered nurse in 1981 while at the same time doing the last year of her four-year course in General Nursing and Midwifery at the National Health Institute (NHI) in Gaborone, presently known as the Institute of Health Sciences (HIS).

'NHI was adjacent to Princess Marina Hospital, so I did most of my nursing practice there,' said Kebohula.

She said that at times she was given bigger responsibilities of taking care of an entire ward without any supervision. 'This made me more capable because by the time I started work I had already experienced how it was to be hands-on in the job,' she noted.

Kebohula said she worked at Marina Hospital  up to April 1988 when she was transferred to Francistown. She indicated that the reason she came to Francistown was that there was a shortage of accommodation at Marina Hospital, so she wanted to stay next to her home village of Tutume. 'By then there was only Jubilee Hospital and some few clinics in Francistown. I was put in the theatre ward,' she said.

During that same period, she said, there was a malaria outbreak, and many people were dying from the disease at Jubilee Hospital. Most nurses at that hospital worked in tents, until towards the end of 1988 when the construction of Nyangabgwe Hospital was completed. She was among the nurses who were transferred to the new hospital, where she worked in both the isolation ward and the male surgical ward.

The following year after opening the new hospital, Kebohula was also among the team of nurses who were at the helm of introducing the Accident and Emergency ward.

'We worked with white nurses and doctors who introduced us to certain areas of nursing. There was also someone who was sent from the Ministry of Health to observe how we were working. It was then that the ministry saw the need for an Accident and Emergency nurse,' said Kebohula.

She was then selected to go and train for Accident and Emergency in the UK. She said she was supposed to have gone in 1990, but due to the Gulf War, her training was delayed. She had to go the following year and spent only a year on a course that she was earlier supposed to do in two years.

She said: 'The course had been reduced to one year and for me it helped me a lot because I had left my family behind. I returned in December after completing the English National Board (ENB199) exam. '

Since then, she has worked as a specialised nurse at Nyangabgwe Hospital. She also did some short courses at WITS (Work Leadership Teams). She said these were aimed at enhancing her leadership skills, because, as she puts it, for areas such as Accident and Emergency one has to have leadership and communication skills.

At some point she was sent to Lesotho for administration, supervision, quality and customer service. In May 2006, Kebohula was deployed to the Ministry of Health on relief basis for three months. The following year she and other nurses at Nyangabgwe Hospital started a trauma workshop that was run by the Norwegians. It was then that Nyangabgwe spread the concept to other hospitals.

Kebohula said ever since she started work in the government health system, she has never thought of looking for greener pastures elsewhere. 'For me I just decided to retire here, unlike most specialist nurses who leave the country to look for greener pastures overseas,' she explained.

As she leaves the hospital, she said she will never forget some incidents when she had to handle abnormal situations. 'We had the Dumela accident in which we had to attend to 50 casualties who were involved in a horrific truck accident while on their way from Dumela. We were just about to knock off at 5pm and we were forced to work overtime until 3am the following day,' she said.

She said her retirement would give her a chance to be with her family. Her husband works in Gaborone at Naledi Brigades and her first born daughter, who is 33 years-old is married and lives with her husband in Orapa. The last born of the family is a boy aged 27 years who has just returned from schooling in Canada where he completed an electrical engineering course.

Kebohula also indicated that she would be taking up the cross and preaching the gospel. 'Preaching is voluntary; you don't get paid for it. I will be doing it from house to house,' she said.