After the foolish politicking, Jamaicans might be moved to think more deeply about Dr Cheryl Morgan’s explanation regarding why Jamaican nurses working overseas are unlikely to respond readily to the call from Health and Wellness Minister Dr Christopher Tufton to come home with their specialist expertise.

A big chunk of the large number of people who commented on her remarks — as published in our Monday edition headlined ‘Nope! We’re not coming home!’ — appeared to have, regrettably, interpreted her statements as being against the present Administration.

However, careful reading of Dr Morgan’s stance would show that hers was a position that is shared by many other nurses in the Diaspora — that they are not prepared to give up the superior conditions they now enjoy to return to work in problem-plagued Jamaican hospitals.

Dr Morgan migrated to the US in 2009 after graduating from nursing school here. She has since then achieved the Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP); Master of Science in Nursing (MSN); Family Nurse Practitioner (FNP); bachelor’s degree in nursing (BSN); and written a book about her early upbringing.

She operates a health clinic with emphasis on type 2 diabetes and is licensed to offer care practice in the states of Arizona, Florida, Iowa, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Texas, and Utah.

As a philanthropist, she runs the Stop A Gap Foundation serving needy people in her Top Mountain district in rural St Catherine with the support of her US army veteran husband.

“The reality is that nurses are treated poorly in Jamaica by our governments. I was tired of seeing nurses demonstrating with placards every time they should get a salary increase. When I was a nurse in Jamaica, nurses were just poor,” she wrote.

“For the few nurses who were in a better position financially, it was not because of their salaries, it was because of help from their spouses or family members, or a lot of overtime work to make ends meet.

“Then we were approached by international recruiters who paid a salary that we never dreamed of,” said Dr Morgan. “When I arrived in America, I was placed in a beautiful apartment with excellent amenities, including a swimming pool, in a gated community. There were incremental salary increases yearly.”

“We can offer our expertise to the Government to show them how to set up proper infrastructure and services in the hospitals… But we will not return to the bedside! We cannot return to the same broken system,” she said.

Dr Tufton’s call in October last year was what any good health minister would do. But he himself knows that it was a big ask.

“What this means, I believe — and I’m saying so with a lot of faith and conviction and hope — is that some of the very Jamaicans who have left our shores for ‘greener pastures’ will reconsider and return to our shores,” he said.

He has had to be turning to nurses in places like India and The Philippines to do what recruiters have done in respect of our very own nurses. Moreover, Jamaicans, from time immemorial, have migrated in search of greener pastures. Many of them have petitioned for or financed relatives, sent vital remittances or invested back home, thus contributing to our development.

Indeed, Dr Tufton’s dilemma is the shared dilemma of all Jamaicans worried about the state of our health sector but who would themselves do exactly what Dr Morgan and so many others did.