With the recent shortfall in critical care nurses, the government of Jamaica is seeking to partner with the United Kingdom to create a nurse exchange programme.
Dr Tufton says he pitched the proposal to policymakers, technocrats of the Nursing and Midwifery Council, training institutions, and lobbyists in the UK health sector after attending a meeting of the High-Level Commission on Health Employment and Economic Growth of the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland.
“We also did the unusual thing of meeting with one of the recruiting agencies in the UK that actually recruits health care professionals for that market, because we felt it was important to understand their perspective and to encourage them to think in a different direction,” Dr Tufton noted, stating that the feedback from the UK authorities, including immigration, has been “encouraging”.
Dr Tufton explained that the proposal would see a programme designed to have lecturers from universities in the UK teaching at the main local nursing institutions in order to beef up the numbers of registered nurses and specialist care nurses. He said the nurses would receive their qualification under that bilateral arrangement.
“There is a shortage on both sides. We could train more locally at the RN (registered nurse) level, but we have a shortage of faculty — I hear people saying we should train more, (but) you cannot train more if you don’t have faculty, because there is a ratio of lecturers to students that is required to ensure certification, and there is a shortage of lecturers, so it restricts the capacity to train. You cannot train more unless you have the practical clinical infrastructure. For example, you can’t have 10 ICU (intensive care unit) students training around one ICU bed, the international standards wouldn’t allow it,” he explained
“The third component to the proposal is once they are qualified, we design a programme that allows rotation of employment between the countries… a nurse would therefore spend some time working in facilities in the UK and in Jamaica in a given period of time. What that approach does, too, it would not disturb the immigration issues that the Government of the UK is attempting to address based on their mandate in terms of Brexit,” he outlined.
Dr Tufton said the approach is a novelty, as currently only recruiting countries usually benefit from mass recruitment.
