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South Africa: Moratorium on New Nursing Colleges an Outrage - DA
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Business Day (Johannesburg)
22 July 2008
Posted to the web 22 July 2008
Sue Blaine
Johannesburg
THE four-year moratorium on the accreditation of new nursing colleges had not adversely affected the number of nurses trained , which had in fact risen, South African Nursing Council (SANC) registrar Hasina Subedar said yesterday.
"The impression created that the moratorium has reduced the number of nurses produced is not correct. It has not decreased, in fact it is up."
In 1998 SA produced and registered 2342 comprehensively trained nurses and 1539 professional nurses. Last year these categories had increased to 2371 and 2093 respectively, Subedar said.
The Democratic Alliance (DA) has called on President Thabo Mbeki to reprimand Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang for not producing new regulations governing the training of nurses. The party also wants the president to set a date by which the regulations should be released.
The moratorium meant SA had lost out on the establishment of at least 114 new nursing colleges since 2004 , DA health spokesman Mike Waters said.
The SANC approved new regulations in May , but they had still not been published for public comment , Subedar said.
"There is a lot of pressure to get the new (nursing) qualifications (registered by the South African Qualifications Authority at the end of last year) and programmes up and running and I hope they will be before the end of the year," she said.
The continued moratorium was "an outrage, given that there are 46109 vacancies for nurses in the public sector alone", Waters said.
"It is yet another indication of the mediocrity and incompetence of the health department that, in the midst of a breakdown in health care delivery driven by a desperate shortage of trained nurses, the department has seen fit to enforce a moratorium on approving new applications," he said.
In 2006 the World Health Organisation reported that South African doctor and nurse migration figures were "dramatically higher" than any of the other sub-Saharan countries, and SA had 35000 registered nurses who were either inactive or unemployed.
A 2006 study by the Centre for Global Development found that more than 4844 were working overseas, and at least 12207 South African health workers in total - including an estimated 21% of doctors produced in SA - were practicing abroad .
"(Tshabalala-Msimang) has repeatedly claimed that she is working hard to find solutions to the brain drain, but her lack of interest in getting these regulations implemented indicates otherwise," Waters said.
The department wants the annual graduates of professional nurses to be increased to 3000 a year by 2011.
Hundreds of aspiring nurses are still taken in by private training providers that offer unregistered nursing qualifications, despite the department repeatedly warning that only SANC-registered courses are accepted, and vowing to close these courses down .
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Subedar said these unregistered colleges, the complexity of legislation that requires qualifications and institutions to be registered and accredited by several statutory bodies, and the problem of "fly-by-night" nursing colleges that took money but did not offer students a qualification that could ensure them a job, had contributed to the SANC imposing a moratorium in the first place.
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