NEHAWU ACCEPTS THE CHALLENGE FROM PRESIDENT JACOB ZUMA THAT SERVICE DELIVERY MUST IMPROVE
NEHAWU has noted and accepts the challenge posed by President Jacob Zuma to the nurses and all health workers of South Africa when he was addressing the Nursing National Summit in Johannesburg yesterday (see New Age report).
The president challenged the nurses and all health workers to improve their service standards in order to rehabilitate the image of the health sector. In his address yesterday the president said "In the health sector, nurses are a pivotal service delivery unit. We have to change the way the public service works otherwise there will be no improvement in service delivery,"
NEHAWU appreciates the recognition that nurses are an important component of a group of health workers and we demand that this appreciation be practically expressed through better remuneration and improved working conditions.
The union supports the call for public servants to change the way they approach their responsibilities in order to deliver quality service. We commend the organisers of this very important gathering and urge all participants to use this platform to honestly reflect and robustly engage because South Africans are looking for an improvement in the way services are delivered in the health sector after this event.
This summit will give all stakeholders an opportunity to discuss the challenges and critical issues that need to be resolved in the nursing profession and also allow them to map the way forward in order to improve the effectiveness of the country's health system.
It is an open secret that the nursing profession has received a lot of negative publicity over the last couple of years because of some shabby treatment experienced by patients especially those who use the public health facilities.
Government's ill-informed policies like outsourcing and privatisation have worsened the situation and the poor remuneration, poor working conditions, poor resourcing levels and the failure to fill the vacancies has immensely contributed to the deterioration of the health sector.
It is unacceptable that there are more managers than nurses and doctors who have been hired in the health sector over the last ten years especially because most health institutions are poorly managed and are malfunctioning.
We hope this summit will address this flawed government's recruitment strategy and will also review the unacceptable rotation of nurses that has occasionally resulted in nurses working overtime and doing jobs that are not in their scope of work.
While nurses have a responsibility to service and treat the members of the public with respect and professionalism, we also expect that their working conditions will be closely scrutinised at this summit and improved afterwards. Our health facilities are poorly equipped, under resourced and overburdened and this creates disillusionment and no one expects disheartened workers to deliver quality service.
NEHAWU is prepared to play a positive and constructive role in finding solutions to challenges that plague the nurses and the health professionals in general because we strongly believe that South Africans deserve the best health service.
This summit will hopefully lay the foundation for the implementation of the National Health Insurance{NHI} by addressing issues like staff training, chronic staff shortages ,poor management systems and all other challenges that are potential blockages in the implementation of the NHI.
We hope that this summit will bring about solutions that will ensure that there is no more patient neglect and that there are minimal resignations, no burn-out, abseentism, immigration and late coming of nurses in our hospitals.
Critical to NEHAWU is the recognition by government that the success of a nurse as a health worker is linked to an expansion of the pool of lower level workers like community health care workers and a proper resourcing of primary health care sites and also a firm commitment to NHI.
We wish all participants a progressive and productive deliberations during the entire duration of the summit.
Statement issued by Sizwe Pamla, NEHAWU Media Liaison Officer, April 6 2011
Click here to sign up to receive our free daily headline email newsletter
