Nurses sick of prejudice

South Africa is short of at least 38000 nurses but some refugee nurses from elsewhere in Africa have waited for more than a decade to be registered and allowed to work here, according to Wits professor Aurelia Segatti, of the African Centre for Migration and Society.

Her report, A disposable workforce: On foreign health workers in South Africa, was released yesterday.

"We need to address this major skills waste urgently," she said, explaining that qualified nurses from the rest of the continent must wait years before they are able to write SA Nursing Council accreditation exams. In the interim many of them work as domestics or hairdressers.

Segatti said South Africa produced between 3000 and 4000 nurses a year but the attrition rate was high .

A further problem, according to Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi, is that 40% of nurses work in the private sector - which services only about 16% of the population.

Segatti said the human resources strategy of the Department of Health launched in 2011 acknowledged staff shortages and suggested that foreign staff be employed to help fill the gap.

But it appears nurses from other African countries still struggle to get a job in South Africa.

One nurse, from the Democratic Republic of Congo, said she was granted refugee status in 2002. But even though her nursing diploma was deemed equal to a South African one it took her more than a decade to be registered.

She started working at a Johannesburg hospital only last year.

She attributed the delay to "xenophobia".

According to the nurse, officials would tell her: "We don't understand your documents", although they had been translated.

Another Congolese nurse, Robert, said he arrived in South Africa in 2006 but was still not registered  in 2013.

He said he was asked to bribe immigration officials.

Wits department of family medicine researcher Stephen Pentz said health workers from Congo and Nigeria particularly were valued because they were used to coping in under-resourced settings .

Segatti urged the departments of home affairs and of health to simplify the registration process.

"These [foreign] nurses could be part of the solution to understaffed hospitals," she said.