Tonga’s former Minister of Health, Dr Amelia Tu’ipulotu, has taken up her new role as Chief Nursing Officer with the World Health Organisation (WHO).
In her inaugural address, Dr Tu’ipulotu said she was privileged to be the WHO’s new Chief Nursing Officer.
She said she would be an advocate for nurses and midwives around the world.
She said they had faced tough times during the Covid-19 epidemic and shown courage, resilience and commitment to their profession.
They served some of the world’s most vulnerable communities.
She said the world needed to be better prepared to respond to challenges in the future.
Dr Tu’ipulotu told Kaniva News she was extremely overwhelmed and excited by the appointment.
“I cried as it was still confidential until the public announcement a few weeks later,” she said.
“So I prayed for comfort and thanked God for everything and I just felt totally lost and overwhelmed!”
She had been travelling to Lao PDR and Cambodia and had just returned to Manila when she was informed of the appointment.
“I was reflecting to my life, my family and Tonga and said to myself: Now I am going to be thrown into the Deepest Ocean!” she said.
“In Tonga I served 100,000 people and now it is more than seven billion people around the globe! “
“How can I? I continue to ask.”
The International Council of Nurses’ President, Dr Pamela Cipriano, welcomed Dr Tu’ipulotu’s appointment and offered the support of ICN in furthering the cause of nurses around the world.
“ICN firmly believes that successful healthcare policymaking requires a commitment to having the voices of nurses heard wherever decisions are made, and that all countries should have their own government-level CNO who reports directly to the top governing executive,” Dr Cipriano said.
“We will continue to campaign for this until every nation has a fully functional government-level CNO in place.”
Career
Dr Tu’ipulotu was the first Tongan to receive a PhD in Nursing in 2012.
She was a clinical nurse, a senior nursing lecturer, Chair of the Tongan nurses’ regulatory board and Chief Nursing Officer for Tonga from 2014 to 2019 before taking on the role as the Minister of Health.
Since 2019 she has been an Honorary Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Sydney, Australia, and in 2022 she was appointed to the WHO’s Executive Board.
She was the first Tongan to win the Alumni Award for Professional Achievement, a prestigious honorary award from the University of Sydney, Australia.
