The Hospital Association of SA (Hasa) representing private hospital groups says it is perplexed that nurses, doctors, pharmacists and hospital managers have been left off the new SA critical skills list, which enables qualified foreigners with required skills to fill gaps in SA.
The list, released by the department of home affairs two weeks ago, details what skills foreigners need to apply for a critical skills visa.
There is a severe shortage of nurses in the country. But unlike the previous list in 2014, the new one only includes nurse trainers among other professionals such as GMs , call centre managers, engineers and actuaries, investment managers and multimedia web designers.
The previous list, which has been replaced, included hospital superintendents, general doctors and specialist doctors, hospital and retail pharmacists and nursing professionals but these have been left off.
However, the situation in the healthcare sector has not changed since 2014 and SA remains short of medical professionals.
Hasa CEO Dumisani Bomela said: “Leaving out skills previously included on the critical skills list sends the message that we have overcome the problem we had — but that is simply not the case.”
He said a change in nursing curriculum and too few nursing colleges means there are already too few nurses being trained and it is taking longer to qualify as a nurse.
“The nursing profession has already long struggled to attract new recruits, a situation that is exacerbated by the amendments to the nurse training curriculum and the accreditation of training facilities that has stalled the numbers of new nurses being trained.”
A higher number of nurses and doctors are over the age of 50, meaning there are not enough younger nurses to take over as the older professionals retire.
“A significant number of nurses in the profession are already over 50 years of age and will be retiring soon,” said Bomela.
The health department developed a 2030 health resources strategy that predicts “a shortage of 34,000 nurses by 2025 if nothing is done to attract and retain falling numbers of nursing aspirants”.
Private hospitals that train nurses are also limited in how many they train each year, even as they repeatedly ask the department to increase the cap on training numbers, as the nursing shortage already affects the running of hospitals.
SA is also short of specialist nurses, such as those with an extra ICU or midwife qualification, leaving under-skilled nurses in high-pressure and difficult positions.
Hasa made a recent presentation to parliament on national health insurance where it compared SA’s staffing situation to that of countries such as Turkey and Norway.
SA has 1.3 doctors and nurses per 1,000 people while Norway has 17.8 and Turkey has two.
Bomela said the shortage of doctors and nurses being trained bodes poorly for future healthcare delivery.
“If anything,” said Bomela, “in the first two waves of Covid, when medical staff were laid low through infections, we came to see very clearly how threadbare our human resources are and how vulnerable these shortages make the healthcare system.
“Our national situation is clear,” said Bomela. “We are not training enough medical skills to overcome existing dire shortages in doctors and nurses in general, and particularly among specialists and nurses with specialist skills.
“We must continue to use the critical skills list as an immediate solution to an existing acute problem,” said Bomela.
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