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Matriarch at the Helm Catherine Odeke, Commissioner of Nursing, Ministry of Health, Uganda

Like many nurses and midwives of her generation, it is the white uniform that drew Catherine Betty Odeke to nursing. Enamoured by the crisp uniforms as a child, she would put an empty white box on her head and pretend she was a nurse. The vision she had as a young girl has taken Catherine to the pinnacle of her chosen profession as she sits at the Ministry of Health headquarters as Commissioner of Nursing.

During a casual conversation with a friend in 2003, Catherine first heard of AKU-SONAM. The friend spoke highly of the BScN programme, and her interest was piqued despite years of experience working at different institutions. It was not long before she applied, was shortlisted and accepted into the programme.

The fact that the programme was designed to accommodate working nurses and midwives who could work by day and go to school parttime was a boon to Catherine. “In most of the health facilities, if a training opportunity comes up, you have to forfeit the job as you go for fulltime studies. You have to look for a job again upon completion. It was very convenient for me because I could be a wife, head the nursing department and still be a student,” Catherine says.

At the time, Catherine was the Head of Nursing at Uganda Blood Transfusion Services and would immediately put AKU-SONAM leadership and management principles to the test at her workplace. To her delight, the results of her studies were witnessed first-hand as service delivery improved significantly. The small and compact classes enabled personalised learning.

“When we used to go for our practicum in the wards they would ask, ‘Who did this?’ ‘Students from AKU’ would be the response. We had a good reputation in hospitals because we would not wait for doctors to come and do the rounds. It really was one of the things that I enjoyed in nursing. “

When Catherine graduated in 2006, she yearned for a place where she could practice the skills she had acquired through her advanced training. Her prayers were soon answered when a Senior Principal Nursing Officer position opened up at the Ministry of Health’s Department of Nursing. “By God’s grace, I made it. My experience and nursing degree from AKU must have made quite an impression.”

Since then, Catherine served as an Assistant Commissioner before finally taking the reins as Head of Department in 2012. The soft-spoken matriarch’s stay at the helm has not been without challenge. When she took office, work around the development of the Schemes of Service document had stopped. Other key policy documents had also been shelved. Catherine formed a taskforce and enlisted the help of AKU-SONAM through the leadership of Principal Joseph Mwizerwa to ensure the document was completed.

Her stint at the top also oversaw the drafting and development of the Nursing and Midwifery Policy document, which now awaits presentation in Parliament by the Minister of Health.

Although she does not get to wear that precious white uniform as often as she would love to, she is grateful that she is able to serve her colleagues and her profession in such a meaningful way. Ultimately, she wants the name Catherine Odeke to be remembered for having advocated for nurses’ and midwives’ skills to be taken seriously in the medical fraternity.

Nurses and Midwives - Leaders in Healthcare in East Africa story series reflect the depth and diversity of the nursing and midwifery profession in East Africa. Download a copy of the coffee book for free here

Finding, capturing and documenting these stories was a collective effort of many individuals and institutions. At the very beginning were the investments made by the Johnson & Johnson Corporate Citizenship Trust, the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KFW), the Lund Family and Rotary International that brought the nursing and midwifery training programme to life.

These partners provided scholarships, support for programme development and faculty investments that were pivotal in enabling the Aga Khan University School of Nursing and Midwifery (AKU-SONAM) to recruit a diverse set of students and build innovative, pragmatic academic programmes

We hope that these stories will continue to inspire, challenge and show the power of nurses and midwives for years to come.