Editorial
Giving the nursing profession its due
A step in the right direction, but more needed
THAT the government has decided to upgrade the nursing profession and go for an increased intake of nurses augurs well for the health services of the country. But raising the job status into class-II from what has hitherto been class-III is not all there is to upgrading the profession which means a lot of other things as well.
Their package of compensation, respectability in the system and opportunities for vertical mobility in their careers should be commensurate with the pivotal role they can play in the delivery of healthcare to the people. They are members of the noblest of professions and, frankly, it has been self-derogatory on our part to have placed them in the class-III category beforehand. We would like to believe that the government has only taken the first step by according a higher status with supposedly a higher pay but there is a lot more to be done in realising the full potential of nursing service of the country.
In most countries nurses and paramedics form the backbone of healthcare services as they provide yeoman's service to the patients, dealing with the preliminaries and the basics of patient management, care and treatment seeing them to their eventual cure. In this context it is extremely disconcerting to note that whereas the doctor-nurse ratio in other countries is 1:5 that in our country is 5:1. This imbalance is made all the more horrific if you take into account the doctor to patient ratio which is dismally poor in our country. This structural inadequacy of the health sector is simply appalling.
It is somewhat consoling, therefore, that the health ministry is going to appoint 2,649 new nurses to fill existing vacancies. But we believe there are a lot more potential vacancies if the expanding nature of health sector were kept in view.
This leads us to the bottom line which is that we have to cater for the great need to set up strings of nursing training institutes both in public and private sectors, if necessary on collaborative basis. We not only have our own requirement of nurses but also required to meet demand from other countries.
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