‘I would do it all over again’

Retired registered nurse Winniefred Chambers-Dyer was among 11 persons honoured as Living Legacy awardees by the Caribbean Community of Retired Persons (CCRP) at The Jamaica Pegasus hotel in New Kingston on Thursday.

Chambers-Dyer, who spent 41 years working at the Kingston Public Hospital (KPH), recalls with satisfaction a career that included scary moments of dodging bullets on her way to and from work, and a stint assisting the injured after a volcanic eruption caused devastation on the Caribbean island of Montserrat.

“It was very unsettling for anyone working downtown, but we managed,” she said of her time at KPH.

The evening’s other awardees included other leaders in business, academia, social work and medicine: Beryl Chevannes, Howard Hamilton, Gary Hendrickson, Eleanor Jones, Peter Mais, Ambassador Aloun Ndombet Assamba, Dr Blossom O’Meally-Nelson, Claudette Richardson-Pious, Professor Maureen Samms-Vaughan and Dr Arnoldo Ventura.

But for Chambers-Dyer it was a particularly special honour to have been recognised for her work during her lifetime.

“I am honoured. I worked in almost every unit, a part from the newly established services that they now have, and it was a pleasure to have served. I would do it all over again,” Chambers-Dyer said.

She says she began her career in nursing inspired by a midwife in her community in Mandeville, Manchester.

“I remember as a child growing up in the country, we had a midwife in the district and initially I started off being a pretrained teacher. But then one day I had an incident with the family of a student, and so I said ‘This is not for me’. So when I saw the midwife, I said I am going to be a nurse or a police,” she recalled.

She did a general training period of nine months at the Bellevue Hospital and would do a further three months at the Bustamante Hospital before going to the Kingston Public Hospital. She graduated in 1969. Chambers-Dyer would go on to further studies in England.

“I was supposed to have gone to Ulster Spring [Health Centre after graduating] and I refused because that was the laughing stock of the health service. It is the middle of nowhere in Trelawny!” she explained.

“In those days, not much was going on out in the country. You either had to come to town to be a nurse, a policeman or postmistress. Those were the positions that young girls would migrate to and young men of course and that’s why I came to Kingston,” Chambers-Dyer said.

In the short run, she ended up at Bellevue Hospital but applied to the KPH which she preferred.

Chambers-Dyer says she especially enjoyed the interactions with her patients.

“My patients, for the most part, I was very close to them, and their families of course, and I enjoyed seeing them coming in, but the best part of it was seeing them walking out of hospital,” she told The Gleaner.

A mother of two, she describes years of a balancing act between work and family.

“I actually decided I would go (overseas) in 1973, but by then I started a family and I thought it would have been better for me to remain with my family, because [of] the unknown. I didn’t think at that time I could have left my children with somebody to grow them for me and to go, and so I remained with them.”

Now treasurer of the Retired Nurses group of the Nurses Association of Jamaica (NAJ), Chambers-Dyer says she is enjoying her retirement and learning how to be a housewife. She has been married to Osbourne Dyer for 48 years.

Her advice to nurses: “If you love people, you have conquered just about anything. You might not get love in return, but you still give.”

ainsworth.morris@gleanerjm.com