AN estimated 8000 people showed up outside Inkosi Albert Luthuli Central Hospital in Cato Manor this week to apply for 300 nursing posts, prompting KZN Health MEC Dr Sibongiseni Dhlomo to urge unemployed nurses not to lose hope due to the limited number of posts currently available in the province. The MEC also strongly criticized the province’s 28 private nursing colleges who train students at exorbitant cost, without considering whether there are enough posts in the public and private healthcare sectors in which to place them.
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Dhlomo was speaking at a recruitment drive exercise in Durban earlier this week to recruit 150 enrolled nurses and 150 enrolled nursing assistants. This is part of a stimulus package which was first announced by President Cyril Ramaphosa earlier this year and, more recently by health minister Dr Aaron Motsoaledi, to boost the health sector through the creation of more than 5 300 jobs throughout the country.
Hopeful recruits travelled from across the province, some even arriving the day day before and sleeping overnight. The Department’s security and emergency services personnel had their hands full managing the crowds and directing the candidates in what was a largely incident-free operation. Commenting on the day’s proceedings, MEC Dhlomo expressed his sadness at the large number of job-seekers.
“It is sad when you look at the numbers of unemployed people who’ve been trained, largely by the private nursing colleges in the province, going over 10 000. When we engaged these private nursing colleges, I asked them ‘what plan do you have? Why do you keep on training people when there’s no plan to get them into the system?’
“All these people are unknown to the Department. We went even further to decrease our intake in hospitals so that we could allow absorption of these nurses. That has not had a significant dent. We even made arrangements to transport them to various other provinces if they need to be seen there and interviewed for jobs. Here and there they’ve been successful, but by and large we still remain with over 10 000 nurses who are unemployed. Today, we assembled them and got them to write a test that will allow us to employ 150 enrolled staff nurses and 150 enrolled nursing assistants. This is thanks to the stimulus package to improve personnel in various hospitals.”
Dhlomo said KZN was the first province to embark on a central recruitment drive in this fashion. “Somebody might criticize us and ask why didn’t we do it district by district. We’re doing it centrally because we want all of them to be on the job come 01 January 2019. ”
“We know there’ll be a significant number of people who won’t be successful through this process. As the first province that has done this recruitment in this fashion, we hope that our tutors, principals and examiners will take some of those scripts and share that database with their colleagues in other provinces to consider these nurses for positions. We know other provinces will also need this category of staff nurses.
“It is sad when you get told that some of these students have spent R40 000 per year on training. For those who studied for two years, it’s R80 000 and you have people going to loan sharks to borrow money. At the end of the day they sit at home and wait for no job coming their way. We want this to come to an end by exposing the inefficiencies of these private nursing colleges who train people without giving them an opportunity.”
