Last week there was a lot of activity in my neighborhood, as my neighbor’s daughter was leaving for the UK. A qualified nurse, she had been working for one of the premier hospitals in Bangalore, and only a month ago was accepted at the NHS in the UK. As my neighbor rejoiced and thought about the sorry state of the nursing in India.
Truth be told I hate to see nurses leave the country. I hate to see doctors leave too. A country like ours with a billion plus people cannot afford to have medical personnel leaving the country. When the
Last year we had focused on the situation with nurses in India. As you all know we continue to lose talent to the west. UK, Australia, and Canada have emerged as leading destination for nurses with more than 5 years of experience. Last year we had spoken to Col Binu Sharma at Columbia Asia. Even in the discussion then it emerged that a lot needs to be done to grow the profession in India.
Earlier this year I was at the Smart Tech Healthcare Summit in Bangalore and explored this topic further with the healthcare leaders and delegates. During the session, I got talking to Dr. Lalit Singh from Elsevier and was pleasantly surprised, by a new initiative by Elsevier to raise awareness about nursing as a profession. They have created a program where they take successful nurses from across major hospitals, across areas like clinical nursing, staff nursing, nursing informatics, nursing education among others and documented their success stories. These include the key changes they made in their careers that made them successful. Based on these stories and anecdotes Elsevier is developing a program and going back to nursing colleges, schools, and hospitals, and help the students and other professional nurses find their career path.
I think this is a very good step and in many ways, I feel the government should be doing this. But as long as it gets done, I feel a good beginning has been made.
Below is the full discussion between me and Dr Lalit Singh on this topic.
As always would love to hear your views. What can be done to revive nursing in India?
>Truth be told I hate to see nurses leave the country. I hate to see doctors leave too.
This is what I was thinking. I think surely the biggest thing that would help India would be if my country (the US) would stop stealing all of your best nurses and doctors. Everyone always wants to talk about how immigration negatively affects the host country, but it seems no one ever wants to talk about how immigration might actually hurt the country from which the people are immigrating.
Hi Luke
I think we lose a lot of them to Canada, Austalia, New Zealand, Middle East in that order. India is a free country to anyone is free to leave. But I wonder if we should modify that to restrict movement for precious healthcare resources. On the other hand, the conditions for nurses is not good and that’s one of the reasons why they leave. I am hoping that demand-supply would be able to take care of that issue.