The Democratic Nursing Organisation of South Africa (DENOSA) has welcomed the new report by the International Council of Nurses (ICN) on the global shortage of nurses and called on the ‘delinquent and ignorant’ South African government, to heed the recommendations of this report for individual countries to address the 13 million global shortage of nurses that will be witnessed in the next ten years if nothing is done.
DENOSA implored the government to ensure safe staffing levels; full vaccination for all nurses; improved retention through better pay and rewards, monitoring of nurse self-sufficiency, and for the international community to commit to ethical international recruitment.
The ICN report called on countries to come up with strategies to retain staff to protect themselves from the imminent ‘migration tsunami’ due to increasing global demand for nurses. According to the report, many nurses in the mid to low-income countries will be lost to developed countries.
“The South African government is not even aware of this and has no counter plan to keep onto its staff. In fact, the opposite is happening, where in provinces like Gauteng the government is contemplating releasing about 500 nurses who are due to do their community service in various healthcare facilities in the province merely based on ‘no budget’. This simply means that patients and communities in Gauteng will be denied access to nursing expertise at the time of need,” said DENOSA.
DENOSA criticised the Eastern Cape’s action of ‘flushing’ more than 600 Covid-19 contract nurses from its system while the pandemic is still raging.
The nursing union warned the government that, if it fails once again to protect the loss of access to nursing expertise by its citizens by investing in nursing, it may take far longer to recover from this blunder as each country would make every means possible to hold onto their nursing workforce, many of whom would be nurses from South Africa.
BUSINESS REPORT ONLINE