It is high time that our nursing education, which produces nurses and midwives to our health sector, needs urgent revamping. It is so sad that our present nursing educational institutions are in a very bad shape and the nurses who up the profession are living in far from satisfactory conditions in India. Moreover, there are not sufficient numbers of nurses to meet our present demand.
As per World Health Organisation recommendations, we should have at least three nurses for every 1,000 population, but now we have only – one nurse for 647 people, less than one third of the requirement. Currently, in India there are 5,200 nursing institutions producing around 3.5 lakh nurses every year.
In India, there are 30 lakh nurses in both public and private hospitals, while another 60 lakh nurses are working abroad, mostly in the Gulf countries, for better payment and working conditions. We need to step up the training institutions by three times and bring in a new law to improve the profession. We should immediately dump the present archaic Act, framed in 1947.
