Celebrating 27 years of uniting nurses

International Nurses Day hosted by Department of Health Mpumalanga and DENOSA in Mpumalanga.

Mpumalanga, please create the foundation to produce specialist nurses on your own to serve your 4.4 million citizens better’ – DENOSA Deputy General Secretary tells International Nurses Day commemoration in Ermelo.

DENOSA Deputy General Secretary, Dimakatso Sebopa, called on the Mpumalanga Department of Health to start building the foundation to produce specialist nurses in various post-graduate nursing programmes to care better for the 4.4 population that the provincial department of health is looking after.

She was addressing the International Council of Nurses’ commemoration at the El-Shaddai Terbanacle International Church in Ermelo in the Gert Sibande District, where nurses converged from all the districts of the province on 12 May 2023.

Sebopa said the reliance of the province on the infrastructure and institutions of the neighbouring provinces for the training of nurse specialists who will care for the 4.4 million population of the province is not sustainable especially at the time when all the provinces are faced with a challenge where they are taking lower numbers of nurses for the post-graduate programmes than the need dictates.

She was addressing the event on the 10 pillars of the International Council of Nurses’ (ICN) CHARTER FOR CHANGE campaign which calls on countries to prioritize in order to turn around their healthcare systems towards a path that is ready for Universal Health Coverage (UHC).

She also called on the province to improve its intake of students for the under-graduate nursing programme from its current 70 when it used to take about between 200 and 250 student ls a year as a feed-through programme of human resource for all its facilities.

She warned of a looming crisis of nurses shortage where more than 49% of the nursing population are nearing retirement and will soon leave the nursing service.

Sebopa applauded the nurses for keeping system intact despite the conditions that they work under. “As DENOSA, we applaud you for remaining the heroes of our system,” she told the nurses.

#IND_2023

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