Government has finally bowed down to pressure and has recruited 340 nurses after it last year withdrew offer letters for 339 nurses citing financial constraints.<\/p>\n
Chief of Health Services in the Ministry of Health, Charles Mwansambo, confirmed the development in an interview with The Daily Times <\/em>Monday saying the group attended interviews which were administered by Health Service Commission.<\/p>\n Out of the recruited workers who have also received letters of posting to different district and central hospitals as well as cost centres are 77 nursing officers and 263 nurse midwife technicians.<\/p>\n Mwansambo described the vacancy rate in the ministry as the worst in the region and world over adding that government is working so hard to beef up the numbers.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is good news, and mind you, we have not done it because CSOs were lobbying for it; we know how important it is. As government, we are still prioritising health services and funds permitting, we will continue to employ more workers. The Global Fund has assisted us with some moneys and we also budgeted for the new nurses in the budget that has just been passed,\u201d said Mwansambo.<\/p>\n Deputy Director for Human Resources in the ministry, Ann Tsakalaka, also disclosed in a separate interview that 43 doctors have also been interviewed by the commission and that results should be out by next week.<\/p>\n \u201cMinistry of Health is committed to ensure that recruitment process is followed in line with government rules and regulations. The commission is processing recruitment of 43 senior medical doctors and will direct the ministry to issue offer letters in due course,\u201d Tsakalaka.<\/p>\n President of National Organisation of Nurses and Midwives (NONM), Dorothy Ngoma hailed government for heeding the calls from civil society organisations saying the exercise was overdue.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have been pushing for this for a long time. We even went to court. It\u2019s a relief to hear that the nurses have now been recruited. They were just sitting at home. I know a year has been wasted but still its better late than never,\u2019 she said.<\/p>\n Ngoma said that there are also over 1,000 newly graduated nurses who need to be taken on board to beef the low staffing levels in the country\u2019s hospitals especially in maternity wards.<\/p>\n \u201cJust recently, 300 nurse midwives retired. So the new nurses who have been recruited are only replacing those getting out. There is need to recruit more than 1,000 nurses then if we are to be seen to be increasing the numbers,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Government has finally bowed down to pressure and has recruited 340 nurses after it last year withdrew offer letters for 339 nurses citing financial constraints. Chief of Health Services in the Ministry of Health, Charles Mwansambo, confirmed the development in an interview with The Daily Times Monday saying the group attended interviews which were administered […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":27448,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27444"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27444\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27449,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27444\/revisions\/27449"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}