Siling Awasa

President of Nursing Association Morobe, Siling Awasa, said the provincial administration, health and city authorities and law enforcement need to work together.

She was speaking after her health workers at West Taraka were attacked during a routine immunisation drive on Friday.

“All of us need to work together to mitigate the spread of this virus,” said Sister Awasa.

“And we the nurses, we’re the frontline. We’re the ones who are doing everything there on the ground.

With traffic diverted to the smaller health centres, nurses and HEOs are now calling for more manpower, proper facilities and adequate medical supplies.

The medical officers had no choice but to come out to the media to make public their longstanding issues of manpower shortage, ill-equipped health facilities and inadequate medical drugs and consumables.

These frontliners are also not immune to COVID-19 as they recently lost a colleague at Lae’s COVID-19 hospital, while a good percentage has been infected.