ZAGREB, February 4, 2020 – Several nurses’ associations on Tuesday warned that over the past six years close to 2,500 nurses had applied for certificates for their qualifications so they can go and work abroad, calling on the competent institutions to curb the outflow of medical staff.
For more than five years the health administration has been ignoring the problems of the nursing profession and it has not done anything to improve the status of nurses, the associations said, calling on the government and the newly appointed health minister to urgently start dealing with the problems burdening the nursing profession.
They called for recognising nurses’ university qualifications by amending the regulation on job titles and job complexity indices in public services as well as for more concrete measures to deal with the labour shortage.
They said that currently 41,332 nurses have licences, of whom 26% are nurses with a university or college degree while 4% also have a postgraduate degree.
Speaking of the problems burdening the nursing profession, the associations cited the lack of nurses, low wages, frequently inappropriate working conditions and an excessive workload.
They called for amending the Nurses Act, adopting a strategy for the development of the nursing profession for the period until 2030, aligning the classification of jobs in medical institutions with the existing regulations, and defining the right to an accelerated retirement plan for nurses.
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