By Alexia Saoulli
THE Health Ministry has opened 361 permanent nursing positions in the public sector and is waiting to hear what staffing needs private clinics have, Health Minister Frixos Savvides said yesterday.
“Hospitals around the island said they needed more permanent nursing staff to meet their growing healthcare demands and so we made a sufficient number of places available to them,” he told the Cyprus Mail.
At the moment, 2,040 permanent nurses are employed by the state and a further 250 work on a temporary basis. This year’s nursing school graduates plus the temporary nurses will cover the necessary 361 new positions, he said.
“This demand will be covered by local nurses and not foreigners,” he said. “If we find that there is still a staffing problem over and above the 361 positions, we will discuss whether or not there is a need to hire nurses from abroad to work for the state.”
As far as private clinics were concerned, Savvides said, the Ministry was waiting to hear what staffing needs they required before it made a decision on how to proceed in meeting them.
But, according to reports yesterday, the private sector needs around 1,250 nurses to ensure the smooth running of their clinics. If this is the case, the Ministry will allow them to employ trained nurses from abroad.
“The Health Ministry has decided to give its consent in the hiring of foreign nurses in the private sector. Up until recently, the hiring of foreigners involved going through the immigration department, which subsequently had to get permission from us before it authorised the process, ” he said, adding that the Ministry had not encouraged or supported this.
“At the moment, the problem in private clinics lies in the fact that the new nursing legislation stipulates that all nurses must be academically qualified,” he said. “In the past, clinics used to hire personnel from abroad who had no formal training and were mere housemaids. When we put an end to this practice, they were forced to let a great deal of their staff go and so now need to fill those positions.”
However, another problem in hiring procedures, according to Dr. Andreas Constantinides, chairman of the association of owners of private clinics, is that the Health Ministry appoints public hospital nurses en masse during August, leaving the private sector in the lurch.
For its part, the Cyprus Nurses’ Association said that if foreigners were to be allowed to practice on the island, they would have to take Greek lessons before starting work so they could communicate with local patients.
And it insisted the Ministry would have to find other ways to deal with nursing shortages, as it could not solely rely on the employment of personnel from abroad. A recent international health meeting highlighted the falling number of nurses in poorer countries. “There is already a global outcry over coaxing nursing staff away from financially weaker countries, with serious repercussions in their own healthcare systems,” it said, calling on the Health Ministry to make radical changes to the system so the local workforce could cover all long and short-term health needs.
