A staffing boost for the hospitals in Split.
It seems that the future will be bright for the nurses and patients of the Split Clinical Hospital Centre. Patients will no longer be forced to watch same nurses working all day long, taking care of 20 or 30 patients each. A public competition for 57 new nurses has just been concluded. At the same time, another call for employing another 50 nurses has also been published. The second group of nurses will be employed for a limited time, reports Slobodna Dalmacija on November 3, 2015.
However, what follows next has very likely never happen before in the history of Croatian health care system. The Split Clinical Hospital Centre will announce another competition for additional 197 nurses. So, in a very short timeframe, the Split hospital will get 304 new nurses.
Hospital Board of Directors has for many years been aware of the shortage of nurses, which at one time was dramatic. Due to the shortage, many nurses had to work overtime, which further burdened the hospital budget. The nurses were tired, dissatisfied with their status and had a lot less enthusiasm for their job.
“With the arrival of new nurses, for the first time we will truly get close to the EU standards with the number of nurses in relation to the number of doctors and hospital beds. Our nurses will no longer have so many hours of overtime and will not be burdened with excessive responsibilities. Their work conditions will be improved, which will certainly be reflected in patient care. At the same time, a large number of overtime hours was a great financial burden for the Split hospital. No one will ever be able to say that we do not have enough nurses in our hospital”, Kolja Poljak, general manager of the Split Clinical Hospital Centre, said.
However, the hospital might now face another problem, since in Split-Dalmatia County there are not that many unemployed nurses. On September 30, according to official data, there were 162 unemployed nurses with high school diploma and 30 nurses with a college degree.
The hospital in Split will not be employing just new nurses. Soon, the hospital plans to employ 12 new administrative workers as well.
