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Carmen Johnson, President, Nurses Association of Jamaica
Jamaica's health sector is to lose more nurses as the British Government has announced another recruitment drive to fill thousands of vacancies in its National Health Services (NHS).
It is moving to attract new NHS nurses from Jamaica despite the unfolding scandal over the deportation of Windrush generation Britons after decades in the UK.
The British Government says, in the second phase of the "earn, learn, return" partnerships, Jamaican nurses will go to work in the NHS for a fixed term of around three years and then return with new skills and experience. The scheme is intended to increase the NHS workforce by 5,500 full-time nurses and help address a record 34,000 unfilled nursing and midwifery posts across the health service in England.
In November last year ministers announced the scheme's first partnership with India and the aim of recruiting 500 nurses by March, though the Department of Health could not immediately confirm if that had been achieved. But nursing chiefs said it was a short-term solution to staffing shortages caused by years of pay restraint and the removal of bursaries for new nurse trainees, and said urgent investment was needed in the UK training.
They added that Jamaican nurses were already very highly trained, and usually have at least four years training compared to three in the NHS, and said perhaps English staff would have more to learn from them. However, the Department of Health said the programme will support the Jamaican government in improving the knowledge and capability of its staff, particularly in areas like emergency medicine and intensive care.
The new deal comes during a week in which Prime Minister Theresa May and Home Secretary Amber Rudd have come under significant pressure for threatening to deport British residents who arrived from the Commonwealth before 1973, and their descendants who cannot prove their residency status. That threat has now been withdrawn due to huge domestic and internaitonal pressure.
The new scheme will also offer NHS staff the chance to visit the Jamaican and Indian health services, but not on the same scale.
NAJ REACTS
In reaction, the Nurses Association of Jamaica has characterised the latest British recruitment drive as "horrible" news for Jamaica's health sector.
Nurses Association of Jamaica President Carmen Johnson says it is terrible because the country has been losing specialist nurses - "those who are midwifery trained, those who are critical care trained, our public health nurses."
Jamaica itself needs a thousand additional nurses "in the short run," she told RJR News.
She chided the Jamaican authorities for not doing enough to retain nurses, arguing that some in government see the departure of nurses as an opportunity for more remittances.
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