Keeping our nurses at home
Editorial
Kaieteur News
July 14, 2004
One of the most frustrating problems facing Guyana and the Caribbean is how to reduce the migration of nurses to the developed world.
The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) considered this issue at the CARICOM Council for Human and Social Development meeting in April. Delegates concluded that there is an urgent need for managed migration of nurses. They found that Caribbean nations invested heavily in training nurses, but rampant migration caused them to sustain crippling losses from their expenditure on such training.
Against this background, the high-powered workshop held at the Le Meridien Pegasus Hotel to discuss the issue of migration of nurses from Guyana, was most welcome and timely. The workshop was organised by the University of Guyana’s Institute for Development Studies (IDS) in collaboration with the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) with the theme “International Trade Negotiations/Proposals: Trade in Nursing Services”.
What is significant about this workshop is that it examined the issue of the international trade in nurses’ skills in a way that entertained the perspectives of both the developed and developing world. This joint approach seems to be the right way forward, since developing countries like Guyana cannot possibly win a lopsided competition with developed countries for nurses’ skills.
As Guyana’s Health Minister pointed out, aid packages from the developed nations must be reconfigured to include ways of helping developing countries to retain vital skills like nursing. Guyana and other nations who constantly suffer from chronic migration of nurses should strenuously lobby for assistance from donor nations to restructure their health care systems to retain skilled workers.
According to a study published this year by the World Health Organisation (WHO), the International Council of Nurses and the United Kingdom’s Royal College of Nurses, nurses have been leaving the Caribbean in droves to take up jobs in the UK and USA because of low pay, heavy workloads and increasing risks of violence in the workplace. The pull factors include: substantially higher salaries, better working conditions and better opportunities for further training.
The WHO report further stated that Regional Governments’ failure to address nurses’ problems allowed for forceful recruitment campaigns by developed countries as they seek to build teams of qualified nurses to boost their health care systems and replace nurses they themselves have lost because of their failure to adequately address the problems of their own nurses. Clearly, Caribbean nurses are taking jobs and accepting working conditions that many of their counterparts in the developed world do not want.
The question of ethical recruitment arises. There are assurances from countries such as the UK that this is taken into consideration when taking nurses from developing countries. Also, the UK’s Department of Health banned UK’s National Health Services (NHS) trusts from recruiting nurses from all developing countries. However, private recruitment agencies fall outside the boundaries of this ban and are therefore free to recruit nurses from the Caribbean, including Guyana.
This has had a devastating effect on Guyana in particular, because the government spends millions of dollars on nurses annually only to lose them to overseas recruiters anyway.
Guyana needs to take urgent steps to safeguard its nurses and seek ways to increase the enrollment of students who want to enter the profession. In short, Guyana needs to train more nurses and find ways to retain their services, whether by more binding contracts or otherwise, since there is no way Guyana can out-compete developed countries for their skills.
How to keep Guyana’s nurses at home requires careful and diligent study. The joint workshop by Guyana’s IDS and Canada’s CIDA is a step in the right direction. We expect solid proposals on how to stem the loss of our nurses, to emerge from this venture.