Bulawayo City Council is facing an acute shortage of nurses who are resigning to leave the country for greener pastures.
13 nurses have already resigned since January 2022, Bulawayo City Health Services Director, Edwin Sibanda, has revealed.
Sibanda said the nurses resign from the government where salaries are too low and then join the council only to use the better pay to buy air tickets to leave the country.
Most of the nurses leave for better-paying jobs in European countries, with some opting for Australia and Canada. Said Sibanda:
We are facing a serious challenge of state registered nurses who are leaving council for greener pastures.
Since January this year, 13 nurses have left for the UK while one has died.
What is happening these days is that nurses now resign from government, where their salaries are low and join council, where they are paid more.
They then use their council salaries to buy air tickets to go to the UK.
The nurses’ resignations are very disruptive in terms of service quality because we are now continuously training new people.
Apart from that, we are now employing these new nurses on contract terms because the government does not allow us to permanently hire the new nurses.
Public sector health workers staged a 5-day strike last month and the Government is already on a two-week notice for industrial action by civil servants, including nurses, who are demanding better salaries.