Nurses unemployed amid staff shortage
An unemployment crisis has hit the country’s health sector despite statistics indicating that over 3 000 nurses and other health professionals are staying at home three years after graduating from different colleges.
However, this sad episode comes at a time when government is reportedly sitting on about $8 million (around K6 billion) from the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria for recruitment of such health workers.
According to information The Nation has gathered, majority of these nurses and health professionals were trained through government scholarships and signed a bond with government.
Thus, the status quo gives the country no opportunity to meet the World Health Organisation (WHO) requirement for patient versus doctor, nurse and midwife ratio.
But Ministry of Health (MoH), while confirming receiving funding from Global Fund for recruitment of new staff, said they had delayed to employ the health workers because of several factors.
This is despite the fact that, according to the Annual Economic Report for 2016, there are just below 4 000 filled posts in the nursing cadre against 13 600 established posts tasked with providing frontline care.
Further, it comes at a time when the health sector is the country’s third largest in terms of funding allocations in the 2017/18 National Budget representing nearly 10 percent of the budget.
“Ministry of Health does not just employ on its own; we need to get clearance from the Human Resources Department. It is a formality in government so we need to create spaces for them so that they fill up those vacancies and that authority comes from the Department of Human Resources,” explained Ministry of Health spokesperson Adrian Chikumbe.
He also said time is also wasted between the moment they request a no-objection order from the Human Resources Department and when they get it to proceed with the recruitment process.
However, Chikumbe said over the past three months the ministry has been holding interviews for various cadres apart from nurses and also promotional interviews for those already in the system to create space for others to fill.
However, health rights activist Maziko Matemba wondered why government was still having difficulties to effect the recruitments despite a guaranteed financial assistance from Global Fund.
National Organisation of Nurses and Midwives (Nonm) president Dorothy Ngoma said they are concerned that hundreds of nurses and other health professionals are trained and graduate but government fails to recruit them.
“We have about 60 percent space in the nursing workplace that needs to be filled that is a pathetic and unfortunate situation and something must be done now,” said Ngoma.
“Seriously, we are frustrated. Government must know that we are watching, we have waited for too long already and its either they fix it or else we will know what to do,” stated Ngoma.
In an article published in The Nation of August 16 2017, Minister of Health Atupele Muluzi also confessed that despite investing a great deal of money in training staff government cannot persuade all of them to stay and serve in public hospitals and health centres.
