Recruitment of overseas nurses inevitable, says Tufton

HEALTH MINISTER Dr Christopher Tufton says that despite the recurring backlash against the recruitment of overseas nurses, the move is necessary to fill key vacancies, including those with operating theatre expertise.

Addressing Friday’s contractsigning ceremony between the Western Regional Health Authority and several private medical facilities for 590 backlogged elective surgeries in western Jamaica, Tufton said that simply upgrading all operating theatres in Jamaica’s hospitals would be meaningless if the personnel were not there to manage them.

“The truth is, if we fix all the operating theatres and they work perfectly, we would increase the numbers of input up to the point where we have the personnel, the surgeons, and the operating theatre nurses to manage the time that is available for the theatre to be used, even on a 24-hour cycle.

“The bottleneck there is a lack of operating theatre nurses, and therefore we can do so much and no more, even with perfect conditions,” Tufton added.

The health minister said that the Government would seek to close the gaps in surgical team personnel and attract talent in diaspora markets for short-term stints. Tufton called operating theatre nurses “the weakest link” in labour supply.

In July this year, doctors and nurses dismissed as impractical plans announced by the Ministry of Health to hire temporary healthcare workers from the diaspora to help clear the backlog of 6,000 elective surgeries.

Those surgeries, which include approximately 2,000 hernia procedures, were delayed from as far back as March 2020 because of mounting COVID-19 cases, which took priority during the height of the pandemic.

But in addressing the criticism Friday, Tufton contended that the biggest priority should be given to delivering optimal patient care regardless of the methods used to do so.

“My view is that we have to find the optimal arrangement, given our objective of bringing relief to patients, and that optimal arrangement means all hands on deck despite the fact that we may offend some people. That is not the intention because at the end of the day, it is not about us, but it is about the people we are serving,” said Tufton.