Monique Lewis

This comes as the province is facing a shortage of nurses and a dwindling number of student intake at nursing colleges and universities.

The union is currently holding its three-day ninth Provincial Congress in Benoni, on Gauteng’s East Rand.

Delegates from all five regions of the province have converged to discuss nursing-specific issues, as well as the safety and security of nurses in healthcare facilities.

As SA continues to fight the high unemployment rate, deep-seated challenges persist. The Health Department has been at the epicenter of job losses for both Nurses and Doctors.

A worrying state of affairs as the country has one of the highest numbers of qualified nurses yet more than 20 000 of them are unemployed. This is while there is pressure on public health facilities to deliver healthcare at an acceptable level.

DENOSA in Gauteng  province says its led to service that is given to South Africans to become compromised.

“Nurses constitute a majority of staff establishment in health. Alone just last year, we had more than 7 000 patient safety incidents, meaning that service that is given to South Africans is compromised. There must be radical decisions that are taken to save the healthcare system,” says Simphiwe Gada, DENOSA Provincial Chairperson.

Occupational safety risks for nurses are worsening, posing a significant threat to their well-being while on duty.

“I think you would know if we were to make reference to what happened in Limpopo province where nurse got raped while on duty, you know of a nurse that was shot dead in Tembisa hospital, you know of a nurse who was raped in Helen Joseph hospital. So, these particular provinces because of their particular kind of clustered population, and many issues, including crime, it will be important that as DENOSA we come up with clear programmes that we are going to drive to wage the struggle to get improvement into the service,” says DENOSA President Simon Hlungwani.

Nurses have expressed concerns about affecting their safety in their workplace.

One nurse says, “It pains us to see that the very service that is supposed to render for our communities, we lack there’s a problem of shortage of staff that leads to patients sitting for the longest time, and unfortunately when they are sitting their first-hand people to suffer the anger of communities is the nurses because they see the nurses and they think they are not doing anything.”

“We’ve got these incidents others maybe we don’t even know about them because they are not reported. But the very latest one is that one of the nurses that were raped on duty. It’s likely to happen again because we don’t think that the security systems that we have in our facilities are addressing the problem,” another one adds.

With over 900 vacancy posts available, hospitals still face a huge shortage of Nurses and Doctors. Gauteng Health says they are working closely to ensure all posts are filled.

“We have been able to extend contracts, we’ve been able to retain nurses and doctors even those that were part of the COVID-19 we are trying to retain as many as possible because we would have expanded services from them,” says Gauteng Health Head of Department, Lesiba Malotana.

Gauteng Member of Executive Committe  for Health Nomantu Nkomo-Ralehoko is expected to address the congress as it continues until Friday.

--SABC--