Nurse recruitment drive:

Arts students too eligible

BY BHARATHA Malawaraarachchi

IN a bid to accelerate the recruitment of 15,000 nurses, the Healthcare and Nutrition Ministry has decided to adopt a flexible policy and expand the selection criteria to include even those who had passed the arts stream in the AL examinations.

Earlier, the Ministry recruited only those who had passed the AL exam in science stream to be trained as nurses and that decision had to be re-considered due to the lower number of applications received.

The Ministry had decided on a massive recruitment drive which seeks to recruit 5000 nurses each year for three years covering 2005, 2006 and 2007.

"For 2005 alone, applications received are below 2000 and as a result, the Ministry is facing difficulty in moving forward the recruitment drive," added the spokesman.

Accordingly, Minister Nimal Siripala de Silva has instructed officials to make the recruitment from art stream too, provided they have a credit pass for Science at the Ordinary Level examination.

Those recruited from the arts stream will be given a nine month basic training on science subjects before being absorbed as trainee nurses.

The recruitment drive was launched on the instructions of Minister de Silva to meet the existing shortage of nurses and also to strengthen the health service.

He said there was a shortage of over 10,000 nurses in the country while 30,000 are required to maintain a satisfactory health service.

"There are only 17,000 nurses and we need to recruit another 13,000 to bridge the shortfall," he added.

According to the spokesman, the shortage of nurses is specially felt in rural areas and new recruits will be deployed to those areas in addition to the tsunami affected areas in order to rebuild their health services.