By Dr Masimba Mavaza | Zimbabwean healthcare workers have embarked on a strike to protest their pay conditions in the country’s new financial crisis. The health workers rallied with placards outside the Health Services Council offices in one of the country’s largest hospitals.
What motivates one to become a nurse? Many practitioners are drawn to the profession because of a sincere desire to help others. These professionals can get a renewed sense of job satisfaction every day as they continue to provide a caring and compassionate service to the patients to whom they are assigned.
It has never been for money. Many nurses have become medical mercenaries, as said.
Our nurses must consider that
becoming a nurse was one of the best choices they ever made. As you engage in this strike please take a moment to recall what motivated you in the first place. It may bring back some motivating memories.
There is a great need for nurses and obviously we all need them to be rewarded. Nursing is not just a profession, it is a calling.
Many people are alive today because of nurses. Because of the demand for nurses and the valuable skills nurses offer, nursing salaries are quite good in other countries.
The world rates nurses as the most honest and ethical of all professionals. Being trusted is a nice career perk. There’s real satisfaction in helping people. In fact, scientific research has shown that the pleasure-sensing areas of our brains activate when we give to others.** Few careers let you help people as much as being a nurse does.
But when your desire to help is compromised by the love for money patients die.
Motivation is something we all wrestle with at one point or another. We need to start with self-motivation. To be an effective nurse, you have to find what drives you. Nursing is a difficult profession and needs a strong motivation to begin or continue it. Money must never be the reason to let anyone died. Can you imagine those who are losing loved ones because of money. Nurses needs self inspection.
High demand, good pay, multiple specialties to work in, the ability to move forward with the career as a nurse is expected but above all nurses hold lives of people in their hands.
Hospital strikes are common — usually, the sides do not agree Strikes or threatened strikes in recent years have typically involved conflicts over pay, benefits and staff workloads.
When strikes do happen, however, they can hurt a hospital’s reputation, finances and patient care. They harm the healthcare of the whole nation. The harm is normally so deep that it will take years to recover. Strike’s effect on patient safety is unexplainable.
It is beyond words. Strike actions have a negative effect on patient safety.
nurses’ strikes increased in-patient mortality by 50% and 30-day readmission by 80%for patients admitted during the strike. Patients admitted during a strike got a lower quality of care, and many are not even admitted.
The number of patients who die because of strikes is shocking.
This deterioration and deaths and any negative outcomes occurs only for those patients admitted during a strike, and not for those admitted to the before or after a strike.
A possible reason for the lower quality is fewer major procedures performed during a strike, which could lead partially to diminished outcomes. patients that need the most nursing care are the ones who make out worst during strikes.
Strike action in healthcare has been common over the last several decades. The examination of the impact of strike action on patient morbidity, that is, all patient outcomes including mortality is shocking. Strikes could range from 13 to 118 days, with a mean strike length of 56 days.
Health workers should think Strike action with a major concern related to patient outcomes, including patient morbidity and mortality. It is not only a life we are talking about. It is lives which we should consider in any of these strikes.
Strike action has little impact on the financial reason which is causing the strike, but the negative impact is seen Onn patient morbidity, and mortality.
It can never be understood why people’s lives has to take a back stage ahead of a salary. The fact that life is sanctity os now a dream. Nurses and doctors have seen life through a salary.
There is never a safe way to call.
For a strike against the government.
Strikes have occurred on almost every continent, for a range of reasons. They have been carried out over a matter of hours to hundreds of days. While healthcare strikes raise a range of issues, one of the most pressing that is almost always raised relates to the impact that the action could have on patient wellbeing. That is, most debates centre on the impact that strike action could have on patients, with those arguing both for and against such action citing patient safety as a major concern.These concerns have some basis as strikes, by definition are designed to disrupt the delivery of care. But the health care strike do go a step further and uses deaths of patients as a leverage.
Over the years there has been a growing body of evidence that has examined the impact of strike action on the health and wellbeing of patients. The majority of this evidence has examined patient mortality, with evidence suggesting that generally, strikes cause significant change patient mortality in-hospital2 or more generally when looking at population based statistics, for example.While mortality is an important variable to consider, focussing on it alone overlooks a number of other patient outcomes that may be impacted by strike action.
My father once told me that a man who does not sleep at home will never buy a bed for his home. This might just be true when applied to politicians on the continent seeking medical help anywhere but home. Zimbabwe is facing the worst year of its post independence life. The economy is resisting adjustment and people are being squeezed to death. Life is not what it is used to be. Sharp comparisons are being put with the former and the results are not good. But all this can not be made right by abandoning patients. Nurses must never strike. Their complaints are genuine but the lives lost will never be regained.
Africa’s public health systems are in a depressing condition it is not Zimbabwe alone. Preventable diseases still kill a large number of women and children, people travel long distances to receive health care, and across the country patients sleep on hospital floors. On top of this, Zimbabwe’s health professionals emigrate in droves to search for greener pastures. The country is literally bleeding. The wells of milk and honey are now infected with blood sweat and tears. Our doctors and nurses have traded their oaths for money. They see money in every sick person it is no longer a call of duty. The health system is seriously wounded.
Thousands of people will die during this strike by nurses and doctors.
It is important that nurses and doctors revisit the reasons they had upon entering the health profession.
Lives can be saved if we put them ahead of money.