Health and
Child Care Minister said nurse training institutions should enrol at least 50
percent of their intended establishment from their local communities.
He made the
remarks in the National Assembly during the question-and-answer session on
Wednesday.
In the past, Dr
Mombeshora said, they used to enrol students with the requisite five O-level
passes obtained from one sitting, but that was no longer the case after they
realised that the requirement was irregular.
“We removed the
requirement that we had said that we want only O-levels and a student should
have sat once. We discovered that some of the children did not fail, but some
of their parents could not afford the registration of five or more subjects at
once. In those places, we are paving the way for those who have more than one
sitting to be enrolled,” said Dr Mombeshora.
Mkoba Member of
Parliament, Mr John Kuka, had asked what Government was doing to help children
from rural and remote areas who have been failing to be enrolled at nurse
training institutions despite repeated efforts.
“The quota
system, which was introduced in 2024, was meant to promote equal representation
in all districts in the provinces. It is recommended that the responsible
officers in these districts consider those who have been applying for a long
time and meet the entry requirements but are not shortlisted. However, the
number of candidates applying for nurse training is very high, and available
nurse training schools cannot recruit a higher percentage due to a shortage of
teaching staff and inadequate infrastructure,” said Dr Mombeshora.
“The ministry
is in the process of identifying and capacitating other institutions that can
train nurses. E-learning has been introduced in 23 out of the 73 schools and it
will address the shortage of teaching staff, but the challenges remain of
inadequate ICT equipment and unavailability of WiFi.”
Dr Mombeshora
said the demand for places sometimes outstrips available places.
“It is a
mammoth task and that is why we simply said in every district that has a
hospital that trains nurses, that same district with that school must have 50
percent of the children coming from that same district. That is the quota which
we did and then we stated that the province should provide a certain
percentage. So, the numbers are still limited, but what we are going to do now
is that we are trying to train quite a number of those nurses,” said Dr
Mombeshora.
Government,
said Dr Mombeshora, will continue to launch more nurse training institutions.
“As of now, we
are to take those private schools that would then train those nurses. We used
to have only Hwange
Hospital, which
was not part of the Government hospitals which were training those nurses. We
are looking into some other hospitals to ensure that they will recruit some of
those nurses to be trained. It is true that we have the challenge of those
children who apply once or twice or three times and fail to be enrolled,” said
Dr Mombeshora.
“Another
problem is, if we train quite a number of them, where will we employ them? We
discussed with the Treasury that the number of nurses should double by 2030 and
we need to ensure that those trained nurses are recruited. Those are some of
the steps that we are taking as the Government to ensure that we recruit more
nurses.” Herald
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