Local nursing body: Artificial shortage of nurses

PRESIDENT of the Registered Nurses Association Idi Stewart is robustly objecting to the initiative by Health Minister Terrence Deyalsingh to bring more than 800 Cuban nurses to fill vacancies in TT.

Speaking to Newsday yesterday, Stewart said the nursing positions the ministry is trying to fill are an artificial shortage created by the government, which was now struggling to find people to fill positions.

Stewart said one of the major programmes the government discontinued was the District Health Visitor (DHV) programme which was under the University of the West Indies (UWI), therefore there is a severe shortage of district health visitors and nurses in communities throughout TT.

He said the government took a policy decision not to continue the training under UWI, which created a shortage in paediatrics and a number of other specialities.

“The government has not been sending people to be trained. We have over 300 nurses who would have been trained by the taxpayer, and they are home not getting employment. This is something similar to the doctors’ situation. The difference between the doctors and nurses is that, there are vacancies for nurses but with the doctors there are no vacancies.

“There are more than 1,500 vacancies existing for nursing personnel, yet they are not hiring nurses coming out of schools.

“You can’t tell me you want to bring in 800-plus foreigners and you have more than 300 nationals at home without jobs. It makes no sense.”

Additionally, Stewart said while it was mentioned the Cubans are specialists, from the association’s experience with previous batches of Cuban nurses, not all of them are specialists.

He said most of the Cubans have been trained in general nursing for a couple of months in a speciality area, which is similar to TT’s nursing system.

“It is not that they are specialist nurses, paediatric nurses, and neonatal nurses; they are normal general nurses with a little experience, and when they come over here, it is our nurses who have to train them.

“We have been making numerous presentations to the Ministry of Education, who train nurses and are responsible for the training of nurses, and the Ministry of Health, to increase the speciality training for our nurses.

“We can train our own nurses to become specialised nurses. Therefore there would not be a need to have foreign nurses to fill the gap.”