SHE HAS BEEN RETIRED from the job as a public health nurse for 25 years, but Pat Wickham’s adrenalin still pumps whenever she returns to the role.
To call her the consummate nurse is not merely applying a clichéd description to the 85-year-old. She remains as devoted to the profession as she was when she got her first exposure in a British hospital and refuses to allow age and personal health challenges to get in her way.
Perhaps she would say nursing chose her. Back in the 1950s when young Barbadians were being recruited to do nursing in Britain, Wickham was among the many who seized the opportunity and answered the call. It was not her preferred choice of career, but the job in banking which she wanted so much continued to elude her.
“I wanted to work in the bank but at that time you had to be white to work in the bank,” Wickham explained. With a chuckle she added: “I was far from white.”
The futile efforts of her Queen’s College headmistress to get Pat a banking job saw the school-leaver settling for a teaching job at the Modern High School instead. But that was short-lived as the call went out for Barbadians to go to Britain to study nursing and she went with that flow.
Her eight years as a student at Queen’s College and her parents’ financial struggle to keep her there is a story Pat tells that speaks to determination on her part and the ingenuity of a businessman father.
“I told my mother I was going to Queen’s College even if I walked through the door and walked back out,” Pat said of her desire to go to Barbados’ top secondary school for girls at that time. But it was an especially difficult time for her father, whose business had gone bankrupt while he still had a wife and six children to support.
Those were the days, Pat explained, when families like hers sent their young daughters to private schools for their early education and later to secondary school. She attended two private schools but her parents’ financial circumstances forced her to delay entry to Queen’s College by one year when the time came for her to go.
With the $100 bequeathed to his young daughter by a family friend, Wickham’s father made a batch of jam that yielded the $21.20 she needed to pay one term’s school fees and petty fees at Queen’s College. Term after term following that first effort, it was another batch of her father’s home-made jam that provided the money needed to keep her in the school of her dreams.
She credits her success in nursing largely to the foundation built in Britain where she spent 12 years studying and working. It was there that she qualified first in general nursing and went on to study midwifery, which turned out to be her favourite area of nursing.
It was also in Britain that in 1957 she married the Bajan sweetheart she had left behind in Barbados. She and her late husband Tony Wickham returned to Barbados and became parents of three children – daughter Angela, late son David and well known pollster Peter.
Today people walk up to her on the street and she is sometimes taken aback by their effusive greeting for “Nurse Wickham”. Many a time it turns out to be a mother whom she had once reassured about their sick child when she worked at the former Enmore Health Centre.
That institution on Collymore Rock may be remembered as the public health facility associated mainly with treatment of sexually transmitted diseases. But it also provided other health care services and catered to children as well as babies requiring post-natal follow-up checks.
The latter was the area in which Wickham excelled and which she said gave her the greatest satisfaction.
“I have always enjoyed working with the babies in the child health clinic,” she said. “I would talk with the parents and muck about with the children while I was working. It was really hectic, but I was having fun.”
She earned the trust of mothers who would turn to her in preference to others at Enmore.
There were stints in other polyclinics as well, but amidst it all she took the time to expand her nursing knowledge, qualifying as a public health nurse in Jamaica and later training as an ophthalmic assistant.
Wickham opines she became a nurse in the days when the majority of people entering the profession had a different perspective of what was required and were more committed.
“I think that the nurse of yesterday did it because she wanted to do nursing. The nurse of today does it just to get the money, generally speaking,” was her studied observation.
“Nurses of yesterday were more interested in the people whom they looked after and they tended to listen to them and listen to their family and tried to sort out things with them.”
In her response to the question about how things have changed, she continued: “A lot of the nurses you get nowadays, I don’t think they are really doing it because they like it.
“It bothers me because I am thinking – and I am not being selfish – but I am thinking that if I am sick, that I am not going to be looked after as I would like to be looked after and some of them don’t seem to care.”
This is why she advocates all nurses should join their professional organisation, the Barbados Nurses Association, which she joined in 1968 and of which she was made a life member last year.
“Once you are a nurse you should belong to the nurses’ association,” Wickham said. It is sound advice one might say, from a nurse who started out as a floor member of the then Barbados Registered Nurses Association and rose through the organisation, holding positions of assistant treasurer, treasurer, first vice-president and president for three consecutive terms. A fourth term was not possible only because the organisation’s constitution did not permit it.
According to the citation accompanying the life membership, the honour was bestowed for Wickham’s “significant contribution to the development of nursing”.
After 46 years, she remains an active BNA member. She is almost sure to be found among the team of nurses carrying out health checks, taking blood pressure and performing other such duties during a BNA-organised community health fair.
Diabetes, hypertension and “a bit of heart failure” may have slowed her but like the Energizer Bunny, Wickham goes on.
Where does she find the energy?
“If I do not do this, I would go and lie in my bed and I would be sleeping all day long and then I would be of no use to myself, so I keep going,” she replied.
She is at BNA meetings on the third Tuesday of every month. She still keeps a schedule that reflects a past agenda that included meetings as a founder member and deputy president of the National Organisation of Women; meetings as a member of the board of the Barbados Family Planning Association, which also gave her life membership in 2015; meetings as a member and later as chairman of Barbados National Health Safety Board.
Trophies and plaques on display in her home bear testimony to Wickham’s breadth of work and public service.
With fortnightly visits to the hairdresser, the octogenarian makes sure she is always well presented. “I was always a fussy person. That’s how we were brought up,” she said.
Listening to her polished delivery as she sips her coffee, you get some idea of that Maxwell upbringing.
It was not long before the subject returned to nursing, as in conclusion she said: “I think that years ago people that went into nursing either loved it or, like me, they grew to like it.” (GC)
