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NAJ President Patsy Edwards Henry
The Nurses Association of Jamaica (NAJ) is urging the government to set aside money in the annual budget to train nurses to alleviate the shortage in the health sector.
NAJ President Patsy Edwards Henry says the migration of nurses has got worse because of the deteriorating state of the health care system.
Mrs Edwards Henry says fixing what she terms low hanging fruits such as developing a formal training programme, ensuring adequate resources are available and improving infrastructure, can be done immediately.
She raised the issues of infant and maternal mortality, for instance, indicating that these incidents need to be reduced.
Citing a maternal mortality rate of 80 per 100,000 and neonatal mortality rate of 11 per 1,000, Mrs Edwards Henry suggested that having more midwives could help improve the outcomes but migration continues to affect this.
"So, what the government needs to do is decide, do an analysis... [of] how many midwives, how many nurses do we need in the system and make a decision and say, OK, the government is going to take the responsibility to train a certain [number] of nurses and we will bond them," she suggested.
The NAJ president argued that bonding nurses will ensure that while there is a flow of staff out of the system, there will be another batch to replace them.
She added that the cadre of nurses, which is "over 40 years old", needs to be revised to "see what our health needs really are and see if we can employ" more nurses.
Mrs Edwards Henry asserted that about 400 to 500 nurses graduate every year, "so it's not that there's a short supply of nurses, it's just that these nurses are not being employed".
Health Minister Dr. Christopher Tufton has said the government continues to build out infrastructure to improve the health care environment and offer security of tenure to replace contract employment.
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