HIV workshop teaches health care for bedridden patients

On Tuesday the National AIDS Policy and Strategic plan was officially launched, on Wednesday the Belize Red Cross introduced its HIV prevention campaign “Faces” … and tonight we feature the wrap up of a workshop designed to teach health workers how to care for infected persons. No it’s not AIDS awareness week but as workshop facilitator Nurse Minerva Jolly maintains, there’s no such thing as giving too much attention to the deadly disease. For the past week, Jolly has been preparing ten participants for the rigours of caring for bed stricken patients.

Nurse Minerva Jolly, Trainer
?The lessons included giving somebody a bath, and we did bathe one of the participants, how to wash your hands, how to put on your gloves, how to put out contaminated needles, how to dispose of contaminated garbage, how to be compassionate, how to be respectful, how to be private and confidential. We learn about the services that we have in the community and there are lots and lots of services available, but they are not going to be used unless people really know.?

?We?re hoping to get somebody from each church to learn these skills so that there will be many little focuses around the city where somebody can go and ask for help. And somebody there will be able to say, look let me show you I have these skills and I think we accomplished that.?

Kendra Griffith, Reporting
?How many of these types of training have you all done??

Nurse Minerva Jolly
?We?ve done them throughout the country, about five of six throughout the country. I also went out for the ministry of health and we train all the community nurses aides in Belize, about two hundred and thirty-five of them in each district we had a group and we went through these skills.?

The workshop was funded by the Belize Council of Churches and organized by the Cornerstone Foundation. In the first quarter of 2006, there were a hundred and thirty-five new HIV infections reported in Belize.