THE Nursing Council of Jamaica (NCJ) has raised concerns about the influx of nursing schools across the island that continue to enrol unwitting students who, after completing courses at some of these institutions, find that they are not in fact registered nurses.

Chairman of the council, Dr Leila Dehaney says it is now pushing for a review of the Nursing and Midwives Act in order to address the problem.

The matter was raised yesterday at the Public Administration and Appropriations Committee (PAAC) of Parliament, during discussions with the heads of the various councils that fall under the Ministry of Health.

She pointed out that an entity may call itself a nursing school, but there are only eight schools of nursing that offer the registered (professional nursing) programme in Jamaica.

“We don’t have a count (of the number of schools) because on any corner you may find a shop being put up, called a school. However, the council is now deliberating on how we pull in these categories of workers called unlicensed assisted personnel, and how we begin to regulate them,” she told the committee, noting that some of these people “may be in the health sector”.

Dr Dehaney explained that “there are no schools in Jamaica that are giving nursing degrees that are not accredited by the Nursing Council”, but any other school, such as practical nursing schools, fall under the ministry of education, where they are registered and (they) train persons, but they are not nurses.

“Some of these persons will find employment in the health sector. Groups known, for example, as patient care assistants, they are employed but they are not registered nurses,” she said.

Committee Chairman Dr Wykeham McNeill told the council to take more responsibility for these institutions, including the ones that fall under the education ministry.

“There is a desperation out there… They hear of a nursing school, they scrape together all the funds they can find and go to this school and at the end of the day they end up with a piece of paper that may not be [of] great [use] to them. So your council is the body that has to protect the average citizen,” he said.

“The truth of the matter is [that] there is no employment for anybody with those certificates — the only beneficiary is the people who run the schools. Is like a rip-off scheme. Most of the time it’s young females… The truth is, they never did so well in high school, options to go on become limited [and] dem (the nursing schools) don’t require anything for admission, so they take all and sundry. They give them the certificate at the end of it that’s worth nothing,” St Catherine Southern Member of Parliament Fitz Jackson argued, also charging the NCJ to take the lead in protecting these people and their families.

The NCJ is a statutory body of Government that was set up to regulate and control nursing and midwifery on the island, and operates a biennial licencing process. Under the Nursing and Midwives Act, the NCJ has the authority to control the training and education and the practice of nurses, midwives and assistant nurses, as well as their registration and enrolment. There are more than 2,000 nurses practising in Jamaica at this time, significantly fewer than the number of nurses per 1,000 population ratio set by the World Health Organization.