Nursing staff crunch ails major hospitals

Hyderabad: All tertiary and government hospitals in the State are plagued by a shortage of nursing staff for a long time.

With recruitments for permanent staff not being made for quite a long time, the nursing strength is a meagre 20 to 30 per cent as against the required strength in most of the hospitals like Osmania General Hospital (OGH), Gandhi, Niloufer, Petlaburj and government hospitals in Nizamabad, Mahbubnagar etc.

As a result, existing nurses (permanent and contract staff) are overburdened with work and this is taking a toll on treatment at times.

The number of beds in all the tertiary hospitals has doubled in the last decade with creation of new wards, speciality departments, ICUs etc., but nurses recruitment had not been taken up.

Take for example, Gandhi hospital where the number of beds was 1,012 when it was at Liberty and the nursing staff number was 218 and there were 44 head nurses.

Now after moving it to Musheerabad premises, Gandhi hospital, at present, is a 2,000-bed hospital and the nurses' strength is 154 permanent nurses and there are another 200 contract nurses (mostly youngsters), out of which 30 to 40 nurses are on leave on any day due to maternal leave, weddings and other issues.

According to nurses association at Gandhi, only 300 staff nurses and 40 head nurses are on duty every day which is well below the prescribed figure of nursing staff strength in hospitals followed across the country.

The nurses association in Telangana State has decided to raise their voice on this issue in respective hospitals. A few days ago, nurses in Niloufer hospital protested against move to open a post-operative ward with 20 beds.

A similar type of reaction was witnessed in Gandhi hospital where plans are afoot to open a casualty ward with 60-beds from June 2 onwards.

According to Sunitha of nursing association, they had given a representation to Superintendent to address the issue of lack of nurses as the creation of new beds without increasing staff will affect patient care and treatment as timely care could not be given with meagre human resources at present.