Nurse Migration From Africa and around the world was one of the future workforce issues highlighted by South African nurse educator Janetta Roos in her keynote presentation to the Australasian Nurse Educator Conference.
Professor Roos teaches health services management at distance education university Unisa, and spoke to the Hamilton conference on the challenges facing the today’s baby boomer dominated workforce as it made way for the future generations X and Y workforce.
Speaking to Nursing Review, she said these challenges included countries like South Africa; and neighbouring countries like Malawi, Botswana and Zimbabwe, who train nurses, but economics sees them migrate to countries with greater opportunities.
She said Saudi Arabia was a common destination and while some nurses came back within two to 10 years, others were lost forever.
“I think there’s a lot of money spent training nurses, then the nurses are poached by other countries,” said Roos. “So it’s actually a cost to the country.” Though sometimes they return to share the skills they gained in other countries.
She said South Africa’s nursing workforce was also affected by employment contracts that mean nurses have to retire between 60 and 65 years. (South African Nursing Council statistics show that 16 per cent of nurses on the register in 2010 were aged 60 or older compared to 11 per cent in New Zealand.)
Also, the active nursing workforce was less than the nurses on the current register because some were employed outside of nursing by pharmaceutical companies or medical aid societies.
Roos said educators also had to make provision for training a new workforce of generations X and Y nurses who need to be trained in a different way. For instance using e-learning and blogs to train them and prepare them for e-nursing roles like telenursing.
She said South African nursing schools were facing a scarcity of trained nursing educators and were also still feeling the effects of nursing school closures by the government in the late 1990s. There was a push now to re-open schools but difficulties in finding educators to run them. ? First International Conference on Health Promotion.
