NURSE SIGN-UP FOR GREENER PASTURES

NURSES SIGN-UP FOR GREENER PASTURES

With the government having challenges with absorbing nurses into its official health care system regardless of its severe shortage of health practitioners in hospitals and clinics, nurses are signing up for greener pastures in the United Kingdom.

700 nurses have signed up commitment to work in the United Kingdom, with 60 have already left the country. The government inability to take up nurses into the health system has forced the Botswana Nurses Union (BONU) pursue a deal to send them to the United Kingdom (UK) as there is a market gap in that country.

Despite the Ministry’s declination of receiving any conventional dispatch, the executive nurse from Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust (EPUT), Professor Natalie Hammond, has said that, “The nurses joining us from Botswana will reduce the number of nursing vacancies at our Trust resulting in better patient experience, and more support for our current staff.”

In the wake of the mass exodus of nurses to the UK, hospitals such as Princess Marina Hospital (PMH) has for quite some time been struggling with issues of long waiting time and overcrowding, a situation caused by shortage of health practitioners.

“Princess Marina, as a referral hospital, receives the majority of priority 1 clients from all over the catchment area, which is the southern part of Botswana. Therefore, anyone who happens to walk into the hospital and coded as less urgent find themselves having to wait a little longer,” said the hospital’s Public Relations Officer, Keemenao Sampisi.

Princess Marina now serves as a primary, district and national referral hospital because of the shortage of health facilitators in the country.