Nurses Cry for Better Working Conditions

Nurses in Malawi commemorated International Nurses Day with "loud cries" asking those in authority to create a favourable working environment or else the country will continue to lose the cream of the medical personnel to other countries, especially Europe.

Malawi is already grappling with inadequate nurses in health institutions due to massive brain-drain, most of who are trekking to Britain where the remuneration for medical personnel is "super luxury" for most Africans.

Clad in their traditional white uniforms, the nurses marched through the streets of the major cities of Blantyre, Lilongwe and Mzuzu, while detailing the numerous challenges they face through songs and placards which they carried.

"Nurses need good pay," read one placard, as the nurses marched through the busy Victoria Avenue and the Kamuzu Highway in Blantyre on Monday. The message on the placard, though brief, tells a sad story of how poorly nurses are remunerated here.

Executive director of Nurses and Midwives in Malawi, Dorothy Ngoma, speaking on the plight of nurses in Malawi, asked employers to listen to the cries of nurses. She said nurses were exposed to numerous risks of contracting various diseases, including HIV/Aids due to poor working conditions, which include equipment and incentives.

"Nurses can work better if they have resources, equipment, incentives and good houses, among others. At the moment, we don't have these and we can't perform according to expectations," she said in an interview after the official commemoration.

Nurses, despite being critical to the delivery of health services as they constitute up to 75 percent of medical personnel in this country, are among the poorly paid public workers and have staged numerous strikes in the quest to force the authorities to improve their working conditions. However, these have not yielded positive results, in many instances.

According to statistics from the Nurses and Midwives Association, over 800 nurses have trekked to the United Kingdom in recent years. The figure, though small, is very big in a country where training of nurses each year is in hundreds and therefore falls short of producing the desired numbers.

"What we must do now is find a mechanism of training as many nurses as possible. We need to produce nurses in thousands every year to meet our growing demand, failing which we will continue to retrogress in the delivery of health services," veteran nurse activist Emmie Chanika told the Southern Times during the march.

Some nurses complained that they work long hours in despicable conditions and look after many patients, sometimes over a hundred in major hospitals, which they said was both risky and unprofessional.

"Some of us have contracted HIV because of the poor equipment we have. But even in that situation, no one seems to care about our plight. That is why many of us, when opportunities of greener pastures elsewhere come our way, we have no choice but to grab," a nurse who did not want to be named said during the march in the commercial capital, Blantyre.

Malawi has one of the poorest health delivery services in Southern Africa, with health centres sparsely located, most of which do not have the required drugs and are poorly staffed.

Minister of Health Kumbo Kachali said government was trying its best to resolve the nurses' problems, to which one nurse responded: "Government will always try but will not do it."