Veteran nurse hails 'golden profession' on International Nurses Day

A veteran nurse who has been on the HIV/Aids frontline for nearly 40 years celebrated her profession as she and colleagues gathered to observe International Nurses Day on Friday.

Mabuyi Mnguni spent years in government clinics experiencing the early devastation of the disease. Later she helped lead breakthroughs in one of the worst-affected areas in HIV/Aids prevalence in the world — her home district of Ugu in southern KwaZulu-Natal — through her work at public health implementation organisation BroadReach.

“Ours is to prevent death and alleviate pain. It’s really a noble profession,” Mnguni told TimesLIVE.

“After training, I was recruited into community work. In the early 1980s we would see children getting ill from measles, kwashiorkor and polio. At the polio stage, we lived by the slogan ‘Kick Polio out of SA’ and then ‘health for all by the year 2000’.

“In 1987 I went into a shop and an elderly man saw me in uniform and said, 'Oh you are a nurse, have you heard of the new disease [HIV/Aids] that’s killing people in some African countries?' It was an unknown, far from us, and associated with certain people such as mineworkers. But two or three years later, I started seeing it in the health system. The disease had come to our shores and we didn’t know much about it,” said Mnguni.

When HIV/Aids became a matter of public health concern, there was a lot of stigma and secrecy around it, she said.

“We were not ready, the government didn’t have the budget and we had staff constraints. We had to adapt and take up additional responsibilities while preaching abstinence and counselling patients.

“People would come with different symptoms. It then became clear we needed to work together. Government was mandated to co-ordinate the programme.”

Mnguni retired in 2020, but then the global pandemic hit and she was roped into Covid-19 co-ordination and training because of  the expertise she had gained from working with HIV/Aids patients.

“Health is a complete state of the mental and physical wellness of a person. A nurse belongs to the community. She is needed everywhere, from an office to a school,” she said.

“Nurses are at the forefront of every health crisis and they too are not immune. We see our colleagues getting sick. And even so, what we do becomes woven into the fibre of our society. It’s a golden profession.”

Health minister Dr Joe Phaahla and his deputy Dr Sibongiseni Dhlomo will on Friday join provincial health authorities, nurses and leaders of nursing unions in Gauteng to commemorate the day.

TimesLIVE