My suggestions are;
1. To start with, all schools of nursing in any teaching hospital where the university has department of nursing should be closed down, and admission to the department of nursing in such school be increased.
2. All others schools of nursing should be asked to affiliate to a university or be given at least 4-5yrs to do so or suffer being closed down.
3. The nurse tutors schools and their products should upgrade to enable them meet up with manpower requirements. Their training must be university based with minimum qualification being a master’s degree.
4. Efforts should be made to create enabling environment for all nurses to obtain an educational certificate from recognized universities.
6. All the present marginalization of nurses and attempt to subjugate them should be addressed. I hope you do not want all nurses to go on mass protest before addressing all these emergent issues.
Majority of nurses are earnestly looking for progress and changes. NANNM in conjunction with NMC should rise up to these challenges. They should not come up with the theory of scarcity of nurses because all professionals are scarce and they are jealously guiding their profession despite these scarcities. Nursing is been displaced all day long with the emergence of auxiliaries and the adhoc midwives trained by the government, the Doctors are out to make nursing irrelevant, but on fortunately they cannot do nursing cores. What will be the fate of nursing if we do not act now?, let us rise to these challenges so that posterity will not judge us.
Time is already against us!!!
By Olufemi Iseyemi Folakemi