Nurses not pleased with plan to hire temporary healthcare workers from overseas

The Nurses Association of Jamaica (NAJ) has joined some medical doctors in raising concern that bringing in temporary healthcare workers from the diaspora to address personnel shortages is not a practical solution.

The additional workers are expected to assist Jamaica in clearing a backlog of nearly 5,000 elective surgeries.

However, NAJ president Patsy Edwards Henry has observed, among other things, that, with the temporary workers no longer practicing in Jamaica, they will have to go through a process of "orientation and guidance" before being able to assume their temporary duties.

Accoridngly, she argued, this arrangement "doesn't seem practical to us," and would "defeat the purpose, because the same nurses that we say are short (in numbers) would have to work along with and shadow these nurses that will be coming in".

Health Minister Dr Christopher Tufton has been defending his visits to eight hospitals in Florida, Georgia, Washington, DC and New York in the United States to recruit healthcare workers.

Dr Tufton said 100 healthcare workers in the diaspora have already agreed to participate and he anticipates that 400 applicants will join the initiative - dubbed Code Care - by the end of the year.

Mrs Edwards Henry told Radio Jamaica News that the concerns of the nurses have been discussed with the health ministry.

Remuneration

The NAJ is also not pleased with the remuneration arrangement for the temporary healthcare professionals whose applications have been accepted for the Code Care initiative.

Under this arrangement, the temporary staff will travel to Jamaica with the Government paying all expenses and giving them a stipend.

Each of these temporary workers will choose either a stay of seven or 14 days with a two-day or four-day rest.

The NAJ president contends that Jamaica has a sufficient number of healthcare workers to clear the backlog, if the matter is approached systematically.

The NAJ's recommendation, she explained, is that the available nurses already in the system be pooled and allocated for specialiy organized days of surgeries at various locations across the island, 

She pointed to the COVID-19 vaccination blitz that was used at the peak of the pandemic to carry out mass immunization against the virus as a model that could be emulated to clear the surgical backlogs.

The money that woudl be spent on the tem;porary healthcare workers initiative would be better utilised in the alternative model being proposed by the NAJ, she suggested.