THE IMPORTANT role that practical nurses play in Jamaica's health-care system can hardly be overstated. Striving for status above domestic helpers, scores of young women and some men sign up for training as practical nurses in privately-run institutions which advertise heavily and which charge tuition fees that the traffic will bear.Most of these nursing schools are subject to no government supervision and set their own curriculum. Their graduates receive no nationally-recognised certification.
So great is demand for practical nurses, however, that graduates of these unregistered institutions, especially those which have been in business a long time and have developed their own standards, find employment as ward assistants in hospitals and as care-givers for the elderly who may be bed-ridden, senile or suffering from some incurable disease. Unlike American and Europe, Jamaicans are not yet completely comfortable with committing ageing parents to a nursing home, although the trend is increasing especially in cases of Alzheimer's. So the demand for practical nurses for the elderly is still proportionately high.
The situation with unregistered, privately-run nursing schools is similar to the status of basic and infant schools in the early childhood education system. There are only 29 government-run basic schools compared with some 1,300 privately-run infant schools catering to an early childhood population of some 136,000 children between the ages of two and six years a crucial stage in any child's development.
Under the Education Act, all private education institutions, including basic schools and nursing schools, are required to be registered with the Ministry of Education. This is more honoured in the breach than in the observance and, in any case, the penalty for not registering is so small there is no motivation for compliance. As with infant schools, unregistered nursing schools can be reckless in the type of graduates they send out into the marketplace.
It is time that government takes effective steps to correct this situation and accept the reality that registration without regulation is ineffective. Uniform standards need to be set for basic schools and nursing schools alike, perhaps even business colleges. These standards must be strictly monitored and enforced if we are to raise the level of education and health care in the island.
