Pretoria - The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted and created the need for more training of nurses, Life Healthcare group nursing and quality executive Dr Sharon Vasuthevan said.
She said they had several strategies to assist during the pandemic, where staff members were redeployed in hospitals.
The group even had college educators and students redeployed in hospitals to fill in the gaps.
“Besides having a shortage, we also had high absenteeism because staff was being infected and needed to take a couple of days off before returning to work.
“Losing any staff member for 14 days (in quarantine) is a long time. The redeployment of our own staff really helped us a lot,” she added.
Vasuthevan also mentioned that agency nurses were moved from one province to another as the surge shifted around the country.
They were provided longer term contracts and are currently employed on a needs basis and come when they are called to the hospitals to meet the needs of patients.
Vasuthevan said the group was also able to up-skill existing staff to work in high care and ICU, which proved to be very successful.
“The ICU was very busy, so we are quickly able to move our staff to those critical areas.
“There was a lot of effort put in to manage staff, but I must say, nursing has definitely taken centre stage in this pandemic. We saw how nurses stepped up, and it was wonderful to see how the media portrayed them positively.
“We want to attract young people in this profession because we feel there is a need for training more people and bringing the younger group,” she said.
She explained that technology enablement in health care, specifically for nursing was something that was evolving, and they embraced it.
Technology assisted patients during the pandemic when they were not allowed to have visitors.
This, Vasuthevan said, was the only way patients, including nurses, as well could stay in touch with their loved ones for emotional and psychological support.
She said they had a nursing strategy that speaks to using technology enablement to support nurses.
Because of the shortage of nurses, they use some nurses for clinical work, and over time, a lot of administration work has crept into the domain.
Vasuthevan said they were hoping to use technology to tackle those processes and make it easier for them.
“We are introducing technology at different levels. Over the years, we have introduced technology for various processes, but we definitely accelerated that implementation because our world is changing,” she added.
Pretoria News