Pioneering role of first Emirati nurse Salma Al Sharhan lauded

Ras Al Khaimah: His Highness Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, Tuesday offered his condolences to the Al Sharhan family on the death of Salma Al Sharhan, who was the first and oldest Emirati nurse.

Shaikh Mohammad offered his heartfelt condolences to the family. Salma used to offer nursing services in rural and mountainous areas in the 1950s. Shaikh Mohammad was accompanied by Mohammad Abdullah Al Gergawi, Minister of Cabinet Affairs, and other senior officials.

Gulf News spoke to health-care professionals and they said they admired her taking the big step in a profession that was not very well accepted at that time.

Salma took an “extremely bold step” to join her profession, a senior physician said.

“Times are changing now and nursing as a profession is being accepted,” said Dr Lalit Uchil, specialist physician at Mediclinic, Al Sufouh.

But, at that time, nursing was not a profession that Emirati women joined, he said.

Salma passed away at the age of 80 and was seen as the Arab World’s “Florence Nightingale”. (Nightingale was the founder of modern nursing and was the healer who tended to wounded soldiers during the Crimean War in 1853).

Dr Uchil said steps are now being taken to include Emirati women as paramedics.

The doctor said the nurse is the health-care professional most patients in hospitals are in contact with most of the time. A doctor comes in the morning, sees the patients for 10 to 15 minutes. He then comes in the evening to check on the patient. In the interim period, a patient depends on the nurse to tend to him. he said. Both the nurse and the doctor have a tremendous responsibility in treating patients,he said.

The physician said people in this society are certainly not close-minded. “We have a top breast surgeon, an Emirati, who went to Ireland and qualified,”

He said he expects to see Emiratis as nurses in the health-care sector in the future.

“What was holding women back earlier was the poor salaries,” said the doctor. “Today, the package is good.”

Anna Schickerling, nurse manager at Mediclinic Dubai Mall, said Salma would “surely have made a difference in so many people’s lives in the UAE”.

Schickerlin has been in her profession for 30 years. She said as a nurse “you will know that every day you will touch a life, or every day a life will touch you”.

Being a nurse, “you have to be a special lady, a strong lady, a dedicated lady, with compassion in your heart.”

Schickerling said Salma has opened the pathway for the “young Emirati ladies out there to this profession”.

Salma is someone “they can look up to”, she said,

Let them know that “nurses are angels that give a community hope for tomorrow. Let the young Emirati women become nurses and make that difference [in people’s lives],” she said.

With inputs from WAM