PESHAWAR, March 22: The NWFP Nurses Association has started a province-wide strike campaign from Wednesday against non-acceptance of their demands by the government. “We have been staging token strikes throughout the province. But the government seems to be least bothered about solving our problems. Nothing has come out of several meetings between our representatives and government officials and we are left with no option but to begin a complete strike campaign,” said Shakeela Begum, secretary-general of the association.

She said that only emergency cover would be provided in hospitals but nurses would not perform their routine duty.

She said that the health department had been asking the administration of the province’s only Post-Graduate College of Nursing to get the 65-room hostel vacated to accommodate students of the newly-launched Khyber Girls’ Medical College.

She said that they had already 52 students living in the hostel while 130 more students had been enrolled who all need accommodation because they belong to different districts.

She said that they had taken over the hostel located inside the PGCN at the Hayatabad Township in June 2005. The hostel had been constructed by the Ministry of Women Development, Islamabad, after a 18-year struggle by the Pakistan Nursing Federation.

She said that government had ordered closure of the PGCN on March 13 as part of its campaign to dislodge nurses and hand over the college to the medical college’s students. She said that several nurses had been suspended to pressurise them into vacating the hostel.

Vice-president of the Pakistan Nurses Association Tahira Tabassum said that the NWFP had 2,000 staff nurses and about 1,300 nursing students were studying at 10 schools in the province.

The post-graduate college is affiliated with the Sheffield University, UK, which had so far trained 13 students who were now teaching local students here.

It offers specialised post-graduate training to students and has so far trained 487 students in Urology, Neurology, Ophthalmology, Intensive Care, Coronary Care, Orthopaedics, Midwifery, Community Health, Mental Health, International Health Education, Management and Operation Theatre.

She said that student nurses had been facing accommodation problems in the Ayub Teaching Hospital in Abbottabad; the Hayatabad Medical Complex and the Lady Reading Hospital in Peshawar, where the government had allotted their hostels to doctors.