Nurses’ union boycotts International Nurses Day celebrations, says there’s nothing to celebrate

As the world observes International Nurses Day, the Young Nurses Indaba Trade Union (YNITU) boycotted the celebrations saying there was nothing to celebrate in South Africa.

The union on Thursday marched to the offices of the South African Nursing Council (SANC) in Pretoria as part of its call for nurses to boycott International Nurses Day.

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The general secretary of the YNITU, Lerato Mthunzi, said they wanted to use the day to highlight the challenges faced by nurses in the country.

International Nurses Day is celebrated each year around the world on 12 May, the anniversary of English nursing pioneer Florence Nightingale’s birth.

SANC’s regulatory role

YNITU accused SANC of failing to come up with a progressive way to allow nurses to advance their nursing careers since nursing education was moved to the Department of Higher Education and Training in 2018.

Mthunzi said the union demanded that the SANC should stop regulating the education and training of nurses in South Africa and leave it up to the Council on Higher Education (CHE).

She said nurses that trained under the old curriculum, known as the R425, were unable to improve their skills because the SANC was an obstacle to their development.

“There are still a lot of other qualifications that, to date, SANC has never recognised that people have gone out of their way to study. They don’t appear anywhere in the regulations of SANC. For example, a master’s degree, at no point has SANC recognised the qualification,” Mthunzi said.

“We study because we don’t want to be stagnated in a profession. But some qualifications are not properly recognised under the SANC that we’ve done.”

Move to higher education

Mthunzi said the YNITU was not against moving the nursing education to the Department of Higher Education and Training.

“We are not saying as YNITU that we don’t want nursing to transition to higher education. It is something that we welcome with great jubilation because for the first time we are now going to get the academic recognition due to us.”

The YNITU said its members were justifiably frustrated about the failure of the SANC to play its role in training and upskilling nurses in South Africa.

It said they were also boycotting International Nurses Day celebrations because nurses were forced to work under difficult conditions in the public and private sectors.

“Where we are working in our wards we know the situation. There is a shortage of resources to do our jobs properly and the patient-nurse ratio they’re wrong,” Mthunzi said.

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