The Sunday News
Melinda Ncube, Sunday News Reporter
THE Government is planning to decentralise the recruitment of nurses to ensure everyone has an opportunity across all the country’s 10 provinces.
Speaking in Parliament last week the Deputy Minister of Health and Child Care, Dr John Mangwiro said the Ministry will sit down and make sure that they have a quota system where each province produces a certain number and the districts contribute by having its own people to the province where the selection is done.
“As we go along, we are going to sit down and make sure that we have a quota system where each province and district produces a certain number of its own people where the selection is done and we have realised that centrally, it is also not selecting from all provinces, for instance, St Luke’s and Tsholotsho hospitals where not even one candidate has been accepted for an e-recruitment,” said Dr Mangwiro.
This is what we are going to be doing but for now, the selection was done as per certain sequence that is tuned in by the selectors at head office. However, we are going to try and correct that and put it into a quota system.
“By quota system it means we are decentralising to provinces and districts that people select at least in every district and province. Even if the places are 200, we will divide that 200 by our 10 provinces and say 20 should come from Matabeleland North, 20 from Manicaland and so on. This is what I mean by quota system. This is what we are going to be doing in the future because we have seen all other systems are a bit unfair.”
He said the dates for implementation has not been put in place.
“Our job is to gather information and students from the 10 provinces. The selection criteria cannot remain e-recruitment.
There are areas where in a district people know there is no connectivity and they use whatever criteria they want, be it handwritten tests to choose their candidates. What we want to do is to make sure that every district has got a chance to have someone apply and be accepted. Our job is to collect the numbers; whichever method they will have used to bring them to the school they are going to be trained,” he said.
