Too many nurses chasing too few jobs

There are too many nurses being trained and too few jobs for them, and PSM says the fault lies with the government's poor planning for nurse intake for private institutions.

PETALING JAYA: Is the government simply incompetent when it comes to the glut of nurses or are the Health Ministry and Higher Education Ministry officers on the take?

Parti Sosialis Malaysia (PSM) feels that there is more than meets the eye and it is suspicious that private colleges are greasing the palms of these officers.

Yearly, private colleges are producing about 12,000 fully trained nurses but there are only 1,000 to 1,500 nursing jobs in the private sector each year, according to PSM central committee member and Sungai Siput MP Dr D Michael Jeyakumar.

Jeyakumar said figures given to him in Parliament showed that in 2010, some 5,000 out of 7,500 nursing graduates could not find jobs as nurses and ended up working at other sectors or were jobless.

There are currently more than 37,500 nursing undergraduates enrolled in 61 private institutes teaching nursing. Other nurses are trained in public institutions.

Jeyakumar said PSM has, over the past couple of years, received dozens of complaints from graduate nurses and their parents, higlighting this issue.

“Many of these girls can’t get jobs as nurses so they work as salesgirls, clerks, and receptionists, which may pay maybe RM800 when a staff nurse is supposed to get RM1,800 a month,” he said.

He said with such difficulty finding a nursing job, many are unable to repay their PTPTN (National Higher Education Fund Corporation) loans, and he asked the government to waive those loans.

“You have to forfeit the loan; if they can’t afford a job, how can you ask them to pay?”

Jeyakumar pinned the blame on the problems on the government officials from both the Health and Higher Education Ministries.

“The government’s regulation of private colleges giving nursing courses is very, very disappointing. The Higher Education Ministry and the Health Ministry are both involved. They are not doing their jobs properly and now we have a gross oversupply of nurses, some poorly trained who are unable to find jobs.

Big scandal, big weakness

He said the Health Ministry was the one that allowed private colleges large quotas for their nurse intakes. The Higher Education Ministry, on the other hand, was the one that regulates the institutions and gives out licences.

“It is a big scandal and big weakness in the system. We are saying the whole thing is a mess. We want the government to tell us whether it is incompetence or is it because the private colleges are giving financial inducement to officers in the Health Ministry? I want them to check as there are only either of these two possibilities,” said Jeyakumar.

Jeyakumar said that sources within the nursing colleges indicate that the profit margin for nursing courses was about 50%.

“So for a typical three-year diploma course costing RM55,000, the private college can get more than RM25,000. This goes into the hundreds of millions in profits, there is huge money there (RM25,000 x 12,000= RM 300 million),” he said.

Jeyakumar said the problem was the weak structure that is influenced strongly by financial inducements.

He added that in the whole scheme of things, only the owners and shareholders of the colleges profit.

“Obviously profit seems to be the main objective here. We want the public, the parents of those after SPM, to know. We don’t want another 10,000 cheated again in future years,” he said.

The government now should cut down and freeze the intake into the private sector, said Jeyakumar, who also called on the government to review its quotas and licensing.

In April 2010, The Star quoted Higher Education Minister Mohamed Khaled Nordin as saying that the government was stopping more colleges from having nursing courses to prevent an oversupply of nurses and other problems arising from graduate unemployment.

“There will be no more private institutions providing nursing courses as we are already on the right track to achieve the recommended World Health Organi­sation nurse to population ratio of 1:200,” he was quoted as saying.

On Dec 13 last year, PSM handed over a memorandum to the Higher Education Minister on the issue, but claimed that there has been no active feedback so far.