KARACHI, Feb 9: According to internationally recognized guidelines, the state-owned nursing schools in the province should have 80 tutors. However, only 48 positions have been sanctioned by the authorities. And only 38 people actually work there as tutors.
There are more than 2,000 students in the 14 institutions. This means that for every tutor there are 53 students. This, by any standards, is a very poor ratio.
Most nursing schools don’t have principals. As a result, the schools are often viewed as game territory by the administration of the hospitals to which these are affiliated, according to some senior nurses.
The nurses told Dawn on Saturday that nursing schools were in such a bad way that the 2,000-odd students had to invite donations to hire part-time teachers for subjects like English, Urdu, Pakistan studies, physics and chemistry.
“All this shows that nursing education doesn’t figure at all on the government’s list of priorities,” said one of the nurses. Very few people realized that without substantial improvement in the education and training imparted to intending nurses, the health care services cannot be improved much, said another.
One nurse said most tutors weren’t interested in providing quality education to their students.
“They approach their work just as any government employee would. There’s no accountability. This allows them to take it easy at all times.”
Yet another nurse pointed out that many tutors used to take it easy when they were working for government-owned nursing schools. But when the same nurses joined private-sector schools they started imparting quality education.
“This happened in the Baqai University and also in Ziauddin Medical University,” she said.
One graduate said the dropout rate for the public-sector nursing schools was very high. “Up to 30 per cent of the pupils drop out in the very first year,” she said. This is another indication that the standards in government-run nursing schools were poor.
When approached, Sindh’s director general for nursing, Ilmiya Mughal, initially declined to comment over the issue. But later, in her capacity as president of the Pakistan Nurses Federation she said only two nursing schools in Sindh were autonomous.
One is in Karachi and the other in Jacobabad. “Yes, autonomy is a problem,” she said without elaborating.
Ms Mughal claimed that the curriculum of Sindh Nursing Examination Board, Karachi, was satisfactory. “Our curriculum is okay.
“It is comparable to any curriculum of any foreign country,” she said. Ms Mughal told Dawn that the curriculum had been revised only a few years ago.
However, the PMA’s secretary general claimed that the curriculum was outdated and needed to be revised by experts as soon as possible.
Dr Shershah Syed was of the view that in the last five decades successive governments had attached more importance to increasing seats in the government-run medical schools or establishing private medical institutions than to nursing education and training.
“The reason is obvious. The MBBS and BDS programmes pay more than the nursing courses. In fact, the nurses have to be paid stipends which makes nursing programmes less lucrative, rather costly.”
In its “alternative health care policy”, the PMA had specifically said that improvements in services could only be brought about if the nurses’ career structures were revised, he said. “The nurses’ salaries should be doubled immediately.”
