Whose data and what can we do with it?
The main focus of the May 2024 Children’s Nursing Educators Forum was the 2023 Children’s Nursing Workforce observatory training directory and report. The purpose of this report is to produce a comprehensive picture of the children’s nursing workforce across the region of Sub-Saharan African countries training children’s nurses, and to communicate this information to national stakeholders to inform the development of national workforce strategies and training plans.
CNDU Doctoral Fellow, Beatrix Callard, encouraged those present to consider health workforce investment principles and the responsibility we have to know and own our data. She referred to the World Health Organisation’s plea for reliable and up-to-date health workforce data.
“More specifically, registries are essential to track health workforce capacity and dynamics, and so is sharing data, indicators and accounts on the health workforce between countries.”
https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240081291
She reminded us of Sustainable Development Goal 3.c | Health workforce:
to “Substantially increase health financing and the recruitment, development, training and retention of the health workforce in developing countries”.
Considering the current climate of significant emigration of specialist nurses from our continent, it is a particularly pertinent time to track how many paediatric nurses are being trained. There was much discussion around these issues and how to best tackle these shortages. Amongst suggestions made the ones that stood out for me were:
- Where are we advocating for change in policy to motivate for better career pathways for paediatric nurses?
- Whether we can make training institution attractive to others in neighbouring countries to then also create income in country
- We need to motivate government for specialist nurses to stay clinical and remunerate appropriately
- Nurses are not esteemed because we don’t talk our numbers ie give the data. If there is no number in the answer people can’t quantify it.
To access the 2023 Children's Nursing Workforce Report click here and for the 2023 Children's Nursing Workforce Observatory Directory click here.