THE Nursing Council of Jamaica (NCJ), said it will be implementing a “Biennial Renewal of Licences” for registered general nurses, registered midwives, advanced registered nurse practitioners and enrolled assistant nurses.

This will require all persons on the council’s register for two years and more must be re-licensed to practise and must show evidence of continuing education in their field.

Thelma Deer-Anderson, the council’s registrar, said this requirement was necessary “to ensure that nurses kept abreast of current changes in nursing and that they maintained competency levels”. She added that prior to instituting the requirement, obtaining a nursing licence “was synonymous with practising for life”.

Approximately 4,000 nurses, 360 of whom are midwives and 750 enrolled assistant nurses, are registered and monitored by the NCJ, which was established in 1952 under the Nurses Registration Law of 1951, which was later replaced by the Nursing and Midwives Act in 1962.

Meanwhile, the Nursing Council is this year celebrating its 50th anniversary and has planned a number of activities to mark the occasion.

The year-long activities will be conducted under the theme “Ensuring Standards of Professional Practice, Education and Conduct for Nurses and Midwives”.

Deer-Anderson, said there were plans to host exhibitions at libraries and to have an memorial lecture honouring past stalwarts of the council.

She added that there were also plans to host an international conference that would include the International Council of Nurses, nursing councils from the region and the United Kingdom’s Central Council. The conference would “focus on nursing regulations and competence”, she said.

Nurses trained in government hospital-based programmes as well as graduates from the University College Hospital of the West Indies training school in 1949 were among the first registrants to the council.

The council was designed to be a regulatory body to control the training and practice of nurses, midwives and assistant nurses and to register nurses, midwives and enrolled assistant nurses.

Throughout its 50 years of existence, the NCJ has set the parameters within which nurses are trained and monitored. It has provided accreditation of nursing schools, developed a code of professional conduct available to nurses at a nominal cost and established a special (temporary) registration for short-term nurses, among other contributions.