In July last year the Democratic Alliance (DA) exposed the fact that a moratorium had been in place for three years on the opening of new private nursing colleges, while the South African Nursing College developed a new accreditation policy to govern the registration of these colleges. A year later, we have discovered that the South African Nursing Council has still not developed this policy and therefore the moratorium is still in place.

We call on the new Minister of Health to set up an enquiry into why, in the face of 42 000 vacant positions for nurses in the public sector and 18 000 in the private sector by 2011, it has taken four years and counting for the SANC to develop this policy. How much longer is it going to take? Surely the Minister must give them a deadline? They cannot hold the entire process hostage while they dither - we need decisive action.

While SANC is continuing to stall on this policy, the government is only now starting to reverse its disastrous 1990s decision to close public nursing colleges. Thus the problem of nursing shortage continues to grow, and patients continue to be turned away from hospitals every day because there are not enough staff.

Last year the private sector trained 6 500 nurses, or 52% of all new nurses. It could have trained many more had this moratorium not been in place.

We brought attention to this issue after we were approached by a private hospital group serving poor communities on the Cape Flats, wanting to train its own nurses and being blocked from doing so by SANC.

This year, we were approached by a hospital group made a plea to lift this moratorium for currently registered hospital groups, making the assurance that all regulations would be complied with. This plea was rejected, and no commitments were made about when the moratorium would be lifted.

Statement issued by Mike Waters MP, Democratic Alliance spokesperson on health, July 6 2009

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