Online Reporter
Zvamaida Murwira
Senior Reporter
ENROLMENT of nurse training students is no longer determined by the number of one’s sittings at Ordinary Level after the Government realised that it has no bearing in determining one’s academic capacity, legislators have heard.
Health and Child Welfare Minister Dr Douglas Mombeshora said nurse training institutions should enrol at least 50 percent of their intended establishment from their local communities.
He made the remarks in the National Assembly during the question and answer session on Wednesday.
In the past, Dr Mombeshora said, they used to enrol students with the requisite five O-Level passes obtained from one sitting, but that was no longer the case after they realised that the requirement was irregular.
“We removed the requirement that we had said that we want only O-Levels and a student should have sat once. We discovered that some of the children did not fail, but some of their parents could not afford the registration of five or more subjects at once. In those places, we are paving the way for those who have more than one sitting to be enrolled,” said Dr Mombeshora.
Mkoba Member of Parliament, Mr John Kuka, had asked what Government was doing to help children from rural and remote areas who have been failing to be enrolled at nurse training institutions despite repeated efforts.
“The quota system, which was introduced in 2024, was meant to promote equal representation in all districts in the provinces. It is recommended that the responsible officers in these districts consider those who have been applying for a long time and meet the entry requirements, but are not shortlisted. However, the number of candidates applying for nurse training is very high and available nurse training schools cannot recruit a higher percentage due to a shortage of teaching staff and inadequate infrastructure,” said Minister Mombeshora.
“The ministry is in the process of identifying and capacitating other institutions that can train nurses. E-learning has been introduced in 23 out of the 73 schools and it will address the shortage of teaching staff, but the challenges remain of inadequate ICT equipment and unavailability of Wi-Fi.”
Dr Mombeshora said the demand for places sometimes outstrips available places.
“It is a mammoth task and that is why we simply said in every district that has a hospital that trains nurses, that same district with that school must have 50 percent of the children coming from that same district. That is the quota which we did and then we stated that the province should provide a certain percentage. So, the numbers are still limited, but what we are going to do now is that we are trying to train quite a number of those nurses,” said Minister Mombeshora.
Government, said Dr Mombeshora, will continue to launch more nurse training institutions.
“As of now, we are to take those private schools that would then train those nurses. We used to have only Hwange Hospital, which was not part of the Government hospitals which were training those nurses. We are looking into some other hospitals to ensure that they will recruit some of those nurses to be trained. It is true that we have the challenge of those children who apply once or twice or three times and fail to be enrolled,” said Minister Mombeshora.
“Another problem is, if we train quite a number of them, where will we employ them? We discussed with the Treasury that the number of nurses should double by 2030 and we need to ensure that those trained nurses are recruited. Those are some of the steps that we are taking as the Government to ensure that we recruit more nurses.”
