Transcript
Pacific health officials agree the region's nursing shortage has not only been caused by a lack of graduates but people leaving the profession because of high workloads and low pay.
The Pacific Community's co-ordinator of clinical services, Mabel Hazelman-Taoi, says by 2030 there'll be a shortage of nine million nurses worldwide.
"That is concerning. So we hope this issue of workforce will be taken up and with the help of nursing now making a global campaign of raising the status and the needs of nursing that people will listen. But on the other hand, who does want to come into nursing? We need to try and attract more people to come in and do nursing."
The Director of Nursing in Nauru, Moralene Capelle, says without a nursing school her country is reliant on neighbours like Fiji to train its nurses.
She says Nauru competes with other countries to attract foreign nurses and struggles to accommodate foreign nurses with families.
"If we are to offer family contracts to each nurse we offer a contract to, we will find it difficult to accommodate that. There are other Pacific countries that are doing the same scheme where they are recruiting nurses from other Pacific islands to meet their shortage. So it's becoming a competition."
The Head of Nursing in the Solomon Islands, Michael Larui, says sometimes he can't recruit as many nurses as his country needs.
In the number of nurses that we have, it depends on the number of vacancies that the government has. But due to budgetary constraints and challenges, like for example for us the government has currently a freeze on recruitment.
Along with more applicants than there are places in Pacific nursing schools, Fiji's Chief of Nursing, Margaret Leong, says there's also a lack of postgraduate training.
But she says a positive development is the Fiji Nursing Specialisation Framework.
"Nurses would jump from clinical setting into management because there was no career pathway for them. They couldn't grow professionally. So this framework allows nurses to stay within the career specialization and provides a career pathway for them to develop professionally and also be rewarded financially."
Ms Leong says nurses need to be able to specialise so they can move into advanced roles.
Mabel Hazelman-Taoi says the lack of nurses in the region is affecting one of its health priorities - vaccination.
"The emphasis still is how do we get our children vaccinated. Some countries have done it so well and some countries are working towards it. And there's a lot of issues around this. Can people come and get vaccinated easily or can nurses have the transport to move out to the outer islands to get other people, our population vaccinated who are isolated."
Ms Hazelman-Taoi says the Fiji meeting was timely as the World Health Organisation has designated 2020 as the Year of the Nurse and Midwife.
