Nurses: Time to be innovative

In the face of diminishing resources, our training institutions continued their training programmes and produced thousands of graduates in various disciplines.
Some of the most-sought-after graduates regionally and internationally, were our nurses.

Zimbabwean trained nurses are now all over the world, rendering good service to foreigners while resource constraints continue to frustrate locally-based nurses.
Poor funding led to a freeze on recruitment of nurses in spite of a shortage at most public hospitals, culminating in a mismatch between training institutions that continued churning out more personnel and the establishment that could not absorb them due to poor funding. In the end, Government had to reduce the number of student nurses enrolled per training intake to not more than 30 from about 100.

The reduction in numbers was in response to a lack of posts in the public sector, which is why the decision to unfreeze 2 000 nursing positions will come as a relief to many.
We believe Government should produce enough nurses for our national requirements and also mobilise resources to ensure that all qualified nurses are absorbed.

After fully staffing our hospitals, we can then have some that we could supply the region and beyond without compromising on quality by insisting on large numbers against declining numbers of tutors.

It takes three years to produce one nurse, a costly exercise that some countries, including developed ones, have failed to undertake and hence relied on nurses trained by developing countries like Zimbabwe.

The ordinary taxpayer in Zimbabwe has been funding the training of nurses for countries such as the United Kingdom, which have many nurses from this country.
To arrest the rampant brain drain, there is need for the country to come up with staff retention strategies that include fair remuneration while more emphasis should also be put on specialised nursing so that the country has enough intensive care nurses, midwives, nurses specialising in psychiatry and other areas.

Many of these areas have a few qualified personnel with the rest being general nurses, and this does not augur well for the country’s health sector as we pursue our Millennium Development Goals. In order to reduce maternal mortality, it is not enough to just rush pregnant mothers to hospital but they should get there and be attended to by specialists in that area.

We believe after reducing the intakes for fresh students, Government should consider identifying senior nurses and offering incentives for them to specialise and go for training in various areas so that we stop focusing on numbers only but improve on the quality of health care.

From about 1 000 nurses being churned out yearly, we expect the number to come down to 300 in three years and it is those funds that would have been spent on the 700 students that should be channelled towards training of specialist nurses and providing incentives to retain the skills we already have.
There has been talk of the country exporting nurses so that Treasury benefits through a formalised way in which the recipient country pays the country for the skills. We believe that should be speeded up so that the thousands of jobless nurses can be in gainful employment and put their skills where they are needed rather than the current situation where many of them have turned to buying and selling and other areas quite distant from their training.

We take this opportunity to commend Government for giving nurses some relief.
As we report elsewhere in this issue, Government has called on unemployed trained nurses to go and register for deployment at the nursing schools where they trained following the unfreezing of over 2 000 posts for registered general nurses.

It is time to think outside the box so that our trained professionals do not end up resorting to menial jobs.