Documents & Resources

The South African Nurse In The Global Village

01 October 2007

In Categories: Nursing

South African nurses have been sought after internationally for decades due to our high standards of theory and practice. South Africa was the first country in the world to legislate nurse training and practice, thereby setting, maintaining and controlling standards. Every nursing course was centrally examined and registered, enrolled or certificated by the S.A. Nursing Council as a quality control measure. This also served as an international “branding of the product.” - Trudy Petersen: Group Nursing Coordinator – Life Path Health Group. (R.N., R.M., D.P.N., D.C.H.N., D.N.E., D.N.A., Adv.D.P.N.)

Trudy Petersen: Group Nursing Coordinator – Life Path Health Group.
R.N., R.M., D.P.N., D.C.H.N., D.N.E., D.N.A., Adv.D.P.N.

OUR INTERNATIONAL NURSES

South African nurses have been sought after internationally for decades due to our high standards of theory and practice. South Africa was the first country in the world to legislate nurse training and practice, thereby setting, maintaining and controlling standards. Every nursing course was centrally examined and registered, enrolled or certificated by the S.A. Nursing Council as a quality control measure. This also served as an international “branding of the product.”

South African nurses are now globe-trotting to the United Kingdom, America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Middle East and up into Africa itself.

Our nurses are sought after because of their propensity for hard work, their ability to fulfill the roles of any other member of the multidisciplinary team, their ability to use their own initiative in a crisis, their ability to function in a team or independently, their inherent professional discipline and their retention of professional accountability.

THE CHANGING TIMES

Our nursing leaders made a drastic decision in the mid-1980’s to decentralise control of nurse training and to delegate this responsibility to the universities. At the same time the training was changed from individual diploma or degree courses in general nursing, midwifery, psychiatric and community health nursing which on average would take 5-6 years to complete, to a comprehensive course where all these qualifications are obtained within 4 years. Each university sets its own standard and there is a great focus on academic achievement often to the detriment of clinical practice, as the duration of the course does not allow time for the consolidation of clinical skills.

A great number of our more experienced nurses have taken voluntary severance packages and gone overseas, which leaves our young nurses without mentors. Students are also given very little clinical responsibility during their training and both these issues impact negatively on their functioning once they are registered.

Nurses are no longer paid a salary during training and are given a bursary, so there is no pressure on them to perform as they are not employed. As nursing is a practical profession, if the trainees are not compelled to nurse during training, they will be ill-equipped to nurse when qualified. This may be the reason why they are found in the nurses’ station instead of at the bedside, as they lack the confidence to perform their functions.

The number of registered nurses being trained is limited by the ability of the universities and nursing colleges to accommodate them and with the shortage of experienced staff South Africa now has to import nurses to meet our national demands.

THE PRESENT

Rumour has it that some countries are refusing to take South African nurses who trained after 1990, so it appears that we are losing prestige in the international market.

The South African Nursing Council is not accrediting courses at present and the slack is being taken up by other institutions in order to address the demands:

• Courses are being designed and implemented by NGO’s and NPO’s to train Nursing Auxiliaries and Care-workers often at quite a cost to the student.
• Some private hospitals have been offering post-registration training to meet their own demands, especially for theatre and intensive care, although some companies also train nursing auxiliaries, enrolled nurses and the bridging course to registration.
• The Hospital Association has been approached to accredit courses in the private hospital sector so that there is a national standard for the training of post-registration courses in that sector.
• The Associated Psychiatric Hospitals in the Western Cape have reintroduced training for the Diploma in Psychiatric Nursing as a 1-year course.
• The Western Cape Provincial Department of Health is offering a course in the training of mentors.

THE WAY FORWARD

This country, our nation and the nursing fraternity have a responsibility towards the nurses who are providing a service in this beautiful land of ours. We need to train more nurses to support the present work-force and to prepare for the future and we need to make it possible for those experienced nurses who have retired or taken packages to be involved in training and mentoring.

The working environment must be made more attractive to our present nurses by paying them competitive salaries, ensuring their safety to and from work as well as at the work-place and by providing them with adequate human and financial resources to do the work, to make but a few suggestions.

We need to re-examine our training for nurses, as we need to regain and maintain the standards which were previously in force.

We have to address the standing of the nursing profession in South Africa and the world:

• Address salaries and make them attractive.
• Reintroduce the discipline on which the nursing profession has been built.
• Train students to act as future professionals on whom the lives of others depend.
• Allow students time to practice tasks under supervision in order to gain mastery before they qualify as professional nurses.
• Ensure that the “art” of nursing receives as much emphasis as the “science".
• Look to the past and retain the best of what we had, rather than change for the sake of change or to replicate what is being done in other countries.

We are the Rainbow Nation in the Global Village and the nurses have always been a pot of gold (just ask the villagers in the rural communities about the nurse running the one-man clinic under the tree) and as a nation we cannot allow this national treasure to become devalued.

If we could survive the struggle for an equal society, we can survive the struggle to improve and maintain the nursing standards in this beautiful country of ours.