Feels the brunt of foreign competition for nurses

Nurses from Jamaica have called on colleagues around the world to help “stop the haemorrhage” of nurses from the country, bringing international attention to the dire situation.

The call comes as part of the final day of the International Council of Nurses (ICN) Congress, which was held in Canada this week. Vice President of the Nurses Association of Jamaica (NAJ), Sandra Chisholm-Ford, told international colleagues that nurses in Jamaica have been targeted by “the influx of recruitment drives on social media”. 

Arguing that Jamaica is feeling “the brunt of the pressure” when it comes to nurse migration, Chisholm-Ford observed that high-income countries viewed Jamaica as “a readily available source of trained nurses” from which they can recruit. The NAJ reported in 2016 that in just one year it had lost 200 of its 1,000 cohort of specialist nurses, including nurse anesthetists and critical care nurses, to the UK, US and Canada.

Jamaica’s nursing shortage chronic

“We found that our intensive care units and our emergency rooms were short-staffed because of that poaching,” explained Chisholm-Ford, adding that “this voluntary separation of nurses has resulted, especially in Jamaica, in a chronic shortage of nurses that has impacted our areas in terms of policy, nursing practice and nursing education”.

According to the NAJ vice president, “Every time you open your Instagram pages and Twitter pages, you see these [adverts] inviting you to migrate [and] to be recruited” in acknowledging that there were other pull factors are driving newly qualified nurses out of the country.

She also observed that high-income countries are offering Jamaican nurses “better working environments, sensitive employment policies, quality of life improvement and attractive salaries”. 

During the final day of the summit, the NAJ called on colleagues from around the world to offer advice on how the country could improve the retention of its domestic nursing workforce.

Possible solutions explored

One piece of advice presented by a nurse from Canada emphasised the importance of nursing programmes being incentivized for students. It was suggested that the government provide funding for a certain number of student places, in return for a contractual agreement that the nurse will work in the country for a fixed number of years after they qualify, or they will have to pay it back.

Mauvette Waite, nurse lecturer at the University of the West Indies School of Nursing, welcomed this suggestion.

“Our government used to provide full funding and training for nurses but at the end of it, we were bonded for the number of years that we were trained.

“That is no longer, so our nurses are paying out of their pocket, and it’s really very costly,” Waite remarked.  Another suggestion from the room touched on the importance of having an engaging curriculum that would attract the next generation into the profession.

Meanwhile, a nurse from the US pointed to the importance of training and developing the nurse educator workforce to support young nurses to make informed decisions about where they will work after they qualify.

Representatives from the NAJ thanked their international colleagues when the session concluded, promising to take these points back to their home country to lobby the government.