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COSATU North West calls for fulltime employment of Community Service Nurses
6 June 2015
The Congress of South African Trade Unions in the North West and DENOSA are worried about the critical challenges facing the community service nurses as they complete their studies.
At end of the year Community services nurses are expected perform their contract obligations with the Department of Health and later are told that there are no vacancies to be filled.
They are told to go seek jobs somewhere outside the North West.
Our call to the Department of Health is to allow health care workers to fulfil their contact obligation for a year to ensuring that the communities are serviced as per their demand.
The statement by the Department of Health citing that they have reach a threshold of professional nurses according to the staff establishment is a contrary to the shortage of professional nurses in the country and in our province.
It is our understanding that the community service contract workers, who are funded through persal are eligible to serve the community service for two years and those who are funded through bursary system the expectation is that they service the community for 6 years as per the contract.
It is perturbing for the Department of Health to be shutting doors for them.
Our concern as the Trade Unions’s Federation with our members, who are students are as follows.
· Today, we have more than fifty community service practitioners, who are deprived an opportunity to serve their contract obligation by the Department of Health since the end of April 2015.
· Series of engagement unfolded with the Department of Health without positive outcomes and his culminated to the bilateral with the Executive authority led by HOD on the 20th May 2015, who acknowledged that indeed they are obliged to appoint those workers and also made a commitment to ensure their appointment by the latest 29th
· The commitment has not yet being fulfilled but rather the HOD indicated that there must other consultations 10th June 2015 to give an explanation for the processes yet these workers are without a salary.
· The Department made a public statement even in the engagement with the Unions that they are not able to carry their obligation and function due to everything controlled by the Treasury.
· The matter of the community service was raised with and deliberated with the department including during the sectoral parliament and the response from the Health Department was that a placement of community service is a mandatory and community service, including practitioners are placed accordingly to the needs of the Department.
· The MEC in his Budget Speech indicated that 50 clinics are operating 24 hours, now who will be doing that work, as we hear that there is moratorium on appointment?
· Those who will be finishing in June 2015 measures must be in place to avoid similar challenges we are facing now.
· We call our national and provincial government to employ nurses to provide service to the poor communities and stop to using the tax payer’s money to hire helicopters and pay them even if they are not doing work for our people.
· We call our President and the National Minister of Health to take the health of our communities seriously and intervene on the challenges facing our province.
· We call all the students nurses to be employed as permanent workers so that proper service goes to our poor communities.
We condemn strongly the attitude of the Department of Health and the North West provincial government on their announcement on moratorium on appointment, whilst communities are receiving poor services.
We are calling the Minister of Health to convene the meeting with COSATU and DENOSA to take up the matter forward and employ all those nurses.
We are giving the Department of Health only 48 hours to respond to all issues as promised in the engagement with the Union, and failure to that we will have no option but to take an action as it is part of our rights .
For more information contact:
Cde Solly Phetoe
COSATU Provincial secretary
0823044055
