Online Reporter
Demand for nurse training places in the country always exceeds available positions.
We reported recently that more than 100 000 aspiring nurses apply for placements at local training schools each year, yet the institutions have only 1 200 available slots.
At some point, there were reports that some officials were taking advantage of the high demand to create circumstances that forced aspirants to pay them up to $1 000 as bribes for their applications to succeed.
In response, authorities decentralised trainee nurse recruitment with the objective of enhancing transparency and fairness.
That was a welcome step, which, however, does not create the extra capacity that is needed to ensure that every aspiring nurse gets the place to train as one.
Clearly, at 1 200 slots, local nurse training institutions woefully lack the capacity that is needed to meet demand in a country of 15 million.
By way of comparison, 505 students graduated at United College of Education in Bulawayo in August, 325 at Hillside Teachers’ College and 414 at Masvingo Teachers’ College.
The capacity of three teacher training institutions exceeds the total number of positions that are available for aspiring nurses countrywide.
The Government has identified the mismatch and has set out to open more nurse training centres nationwide, the Deputy Minister of Health and Child Care, Sleiman Kwidini said.
“The Second Republic under the leadership of President Mnangagwa is working on opening more nurse training centres across the country, as part of efforts to decentralise nurse training schools and increase access to healthcare education, leaving no one and no place behind in line with Vision 2030,” he said while officiating at a recent graduation ceremony of 173 primary care nurses at Gokwe South District Hospital.
It is important that the Government is addressing this obvious challenge.
The exercise must be rolled out with maximum speed so that the country widens training opportunities to enable more of our people to undergo the training they desperately want to get.
This creates employment in many ways — at the stage of building the requisite infrastructure, provision of supporting services, the teaching staff, management and supporting staff and so on.
More training slots will reduce pressure on the few existing training centres. Because demand would be spread across more training institutions, we think opportunities for corruption in selection processes would be reduced as well.
As we open more training centres and provide training opportunities for a growing number of our people at the new places, the legacy colleges must expand their enrolments too.
