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The bashing came just shortly after the Minister of Health, Honorable Pablo Marin who attended the opening ceremony had left. Longsworth was one of several presenters at the day's conference, speaking on Nursing Ethics. Her passion for the rights and ethical treatment of patients became obvious right at the start of her presentation, but it was more her disdain for the growing moral decay amongst those in the profession that seemed to resonate.

Nurse Laura Longsworth, Health Systems Manager Consultant
"As to telling the truth, my goodness, I think Belize - this society has gone nuts. Nobody is telling the truth these days. They are talking through two sides of their mouth. The physicians are doing it and the nurses are doing it, the politicians are doing it. What are we doing? And then this is affecting the population we serve. We serve people. This is what we do, don't forget the caring interaction has to do with respect, truthfulness."

Jim McFadzean Reporting
The truthfulness or lack of it thereof, might explain why a Review Proposal on the working conditions of Nurses in Belize presented to both the PUP and UDP administrations has gathered nothing but dust despite promises to address the issue.

Nurse Laura Longsworth, Health Systems Manager Consultant
"This nursing review document is concern with moving salary scales from on level - very low level for a nurse who is qualify to a level that they can meet the standards that they require in these times. The type of salary they need, the benefits - there are no benefits. Recently we had a nurse travelling from PG in an ambulance in the dead of night to the hospital for treatment - there was an accident and a patient died. If you ask the nurses 'do you have insurance?' they will tell you no, they are not insured. These are the kind of issues that need to be address. Subsequent governments have neglected to do so. This was done, it was not presented. This government says that they will look at it; we are three years into the process. They say it's been tabled, we look for the information, it has not been tabled and there seems to be no kind of political will to get it done."

And while the politicians took a lashing for the state of Nurses' affairs in Belize, Longsworth wasn't too kind either to her fellow nurses who she says are equally to blame.

Nurse Laura Longsworth, Health Systems Manager Consultant
"I think that we are to be blame. I think the profession - we as nurses we have to become organize and more strategic in making sure that we get to a point where we are in good standing and are able to take care of the Belizean populist and so I think that the Belizean population needs to help us to get there."

There are more than 500 nurse practitioners working in both private and public healthcare institutions. They make up 80 percent of the country's healthcare providers, but over the last decade have been poorly organized. A new executive of the Nurses Association of Belize is hard at work trying to change that.

Lidia Alpuche Blake, President, NAB
"We lack membership and that was the one goal I had when I because president and I would advocate that every meeting we would have hold meeting everywhere, anytime we would inform all kind of way. I didn't know what strategy to use to rekindle and bring the nurses. We have more financial members. We have relicense with international counsel of nursing which this year their conference just concluded May 8th and that's where the theme is coming from and I have liaise and I have lobbied with them and in tat conference we couldn't go because of lack of sponsorship. But at their conference one of first things that they came out is to provide assistance to smaller association in different countries to lobby for working conditions of nurses to be improved. So with this now that I have more members in the association and it's a new era of nurses, we are more educated. Politics plays a major role in Belize, we are not been taken into politics anymore, we are using what we have - our knowledge and saying enough is enough we need to take a stand."

We were unable to reach anyone from the Ministry Of Health to get comment on the review of working conditions for nurses in Belize….