• Fewer post-A/L applicants entering training 

The shortage of nursing officers in 32 divisional hospitals in the Jaffna District is affecting the provision of healthcare services, with a call being made to recruit more nurses from the Northern Province to address the issue.

Speaking to The Daily Morning, an informed source in the Provincial health services said yesterday (15) that some hospitals have very few nursing officers, with patients admitted following accidents or snake bites sometimes facing a situation where no nursing officer is available. The source claimed that minor staff are administering medicines in such circumstances. The source said that hospitals in the Province are repeatedly receiving newly recruited nurses for training, only to lose them through transfers to other parts of the country. This had left hospitals having to train new batches of nurses, affecting the continuity of patient care. “Northern hospitals are more like training centres for nurses,” the source said, pointing out that nurses recruited from areas such as Galle, Karapitiya and Kandy had to travel home regularly and are eventually transferred after completing their training and service in the North.

The source said that the Government should consider recruiting more people from the Province to ensure that hospitals had a stable nursing workforce. Although there are concerns about the reluctance of young people who had completed the General Certificate of Education Advanced Level (A/L) Examination in the Biology stream to enter the nursing profession, the source said that recruitment could be expanded to include students from other subject streams. The source cited a special recruitment initiative carried out during the tenure of former Health Minister Dr Rajitha Senaratne, under which Tamil students who had sat the A/L Examination in different subject streams were recruited for nursing training. “There are ways to increase the number of school leavers joining the nursing profession in the Province, especially in the district,” the source said, suggesting that similar recruitment programmes could be considered. The source stressed that the concern is not about nurses from other ethnic communities serving in the North, but about ensuring that patients receive proper care without hospitals repeatedly losing their nursing staff to transfers elsewhere. “We are not against nurses from other ethnicities coming here. Our concern is for poor patients who come to State hospitals in the district, only for the hospitals to serve as training centres before the nurses are transferred to other parts of the country. It is the patient who suffers,” the source said.

When contacted for comment, Deputy Health Minister Dr Hansaka Wijemuni said that the number of students entering nursing training varied between districts, with fewer applicants coming from some areas. He said that nursing trainees are selected based on the Z-scores of students who apply for nursing training. While districts such as Galle, Matara, Hambantota, Kurunegala and Kegalle generally record higher numbers of applicants, fewer applications come from Colombo and the Northern and Eastern Provinces.