The National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom is planning to introduce a new policy to make nurses perform surgery.
The new rule is aimed at reducing hospital waiting times for patients within the NHIS. Under the new arrangement, nurses will be encouraged to undergo a two-year course.
The arrangement would allow nurses to perform minor surgeries like hernia surgery and remove benign cysts and some type of skin cancers.
The new training shall enable nurses to function as surgical care practitioners.
The arrangement is expected to be laid out in NHS’s Peoples Plan next month.
According to the mailonline, “latest NHS figures show that 43,600 nursing posts – or 12 per cent – are vacant, at a time when demand for good nursing care has never been higher.”
In reacting to the new arrangement, critics have warned that the new policy may worsen the shortage of nurses that is already facing the NHS, the source also noted.
The World Health Organization has declared the year 2020 as International Year of The Nurse and Midwife in order to allow countries to focus on the importance of the profession and pay attention to the increasing shortage of human resources for health within the profession.
It is expected that Africa will need an estimated 3 million nurses and midwives for Universal Health Coverage. Those currently available are not enough, many of whom may also embark on a voyage to the UK in search of greener pastures worsening the shortage crisis already facing Africa within the profession.
Will this arrangement, it will only take 6 years to train a surgical care practitioner compared with 16 years required to train a specialist surgeon.
Could this arrangement then be the gamechanger for the NHS as planned without serious collateral damage? Only time will tell.
