Health ministry to tackle nurse 'snatching'
Published:Tuesday | January 10, 2017 | 12:00 AM
Minister of Health Dr Christopher Tufton has stated that the ministry is fine-tuning a sustainable proposal to collaborate with developed countries that heavily recruit Jamaican specialist nurses. This collaboration will be in the areas of training and employment.
Tufton told The Gleaner: "In the area of specialisation, we are constantly recruited by countries with shortfalls, who can offer a lot more resources than we can. We should say to those countries, why not collaborate on the training since we are restricted by the infrastructure?"
He added: "We are saying to countries like the United Kingdom that recruit from us, open up your health-care system with your infrastructure, let us collaborate where we give the theory, you give the practical, and if we can work out an arrangement to provide an exchange of kind periodically, between us and you, where you get the use of these practitioners who are so interested. But we get them also who are so interested."
Tufton disclosed that discussions have already begun with some of the countries.
He stated that Cuba has agreed to train some nurses in specialist areas, and that talks were ongoing with two other developed countries about doing the same, and a third, which is a developing but very large country.
On the topic of briefing the wider health community at the upcoming board meeting in Geneva, Tufton told The Gleaner: "The agenda, as it relates to the World Health Organization, is to seek to establish a more orderly arrangement in the movement of specialist health-care professionals between jurisdictions. It is not about restricting, it's about an orderly movement where that movement takes place. We have an obligation as a country to do that."