Registered nurse

Major private hospital groups in South Africa are importing staff from India to quell the dire shortage of qualified nurses facing the country. Hospital groups like Netcare, Life and Medi-Clinic said yesterday that Indian nurses, male and female, were highly skilled, fluent in English and dedicated to the profession.

Community service nurses will be paid as registered nurses only after a year of doing such service, the Health Department said on Wednesday.

Closing date: 13 February 2007

Mosaic is currently looking for a Professional Nurse to administrate the clinic and implement the required duties. For the first few months the encumbent will be stationed at Mosaics clinic in Wynberg until the Browns Farm Clinic has been established.

Nurses' participation in industrial action during the public sector strike raises key concerns with regard to our health system. Traditionally nurses have not engaged in strike action as part of essential services precluded from such strikes. Nurses now appear to be giving expression to their frustration by engaging in strike action and defying the definition of essential or emergency services. This presents a huge challenge to our public health system, in which nurses are the backbone of health care delivery at all levels.

With 26 beds, the Red Cross Children's Hospital has the largest paediatric intensive care unit in the country but has recently been forced to close another two beds in its ICU as a result of a shortage of appropriately qualified nurses and doctors.

Assistants and allowances may help address staff shortages.

The British government is to tighten regulations on employment of health care workers from developing countries in order to stop draining key staff from nations hard hit by AIDS, Health Minister John Hutton announced this week during a visit to South Africa.

January 2005 is the target date for the introduction of community service for nurses - but there is still much to be done for the Department of Health to meet its deadline and accommodate the more than 1 000 newly qualified nurses who are due to enter the health system next year.

The Women's Health Research Unit, Department of Public Health & Family Medicine in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO) seeks one nurse interviewer for this 10-month contract position for appointment from 1 August 2003 or as soon as possible thereafter.

Private hospitals are pulling out all the stops to keep nurses from taking up lucrative offers overseas. Salary incentives and training programmes are just some of the carrots being dangled before staff to keep them loyal. In the past year Medi-Clinic, the hospital group which employs 6 500 nurses, lost about 200 people to overseas postings. Last year it started a service bonus scheme. The company pays loyal nursing staff a 14th cheque. The scheme will cost Medi-Clinic R20-million for the financial year ending March. In a bid to encourage nurses to stay in the country, Network Healthcare Holdings (Netcare) offers their nurses the opportunity to work overseas for four to six weeks at a time on Netcare projects such as Operation Cataract, which was undertaken in the UK in November, and an orthopaedic project in the UK coming up in July. Management at Afrox Healthcare, another major private hospital company, was not available for comment. But the company says in its 2002 annual report that the loss of experienced nursing staff is a major issue. The shortage of nurses is made worse by the fact that government has cut back the budget for training and reduced the number of training colleges for nurses. Private hospitals have picked up much of the slack. Medi-Clinic, which has been training nurses for more than 10 years, is spending upwards of R40-million to train 700 nurses a year. In South Africa the shortages relate particularly to nurses w ith post-basic ualifications, or experience in intensive care, theatre, and neo-natal intensive care.(Source: Adele Shevel Business Times, 2 February 2003)