The Ministry of Health and Medical Services will broaden the training opportunities for the professional development of Fijian Nursing Services (FNS).

The director for Fiji Nursing Services, Silina Waqa-Ledua reiterates on the importance of training being a key strategy to enhance the role of nurses.

“One of the key priorities for nursing division is to provide more training programmes to help support the professional development of our nurses.

“The impacts of training is seen in the quality of their work and mentoring of the young nurses who join the service.

“There will be more focus onto providing training in the specialised nursing like coronary care, intensive care, accident and emergency, paediatric nursing, midwifery and public health.

“We also have to ensure that the role of nurses in the non-communicable disease (NCD) control becomes much more developed.

“Training programmes will incorporate the development of soft skills of nurses which is their communication skills, professionalism, leadership, team work, networking and serving with compassion and empathy.

“We also have a monitoring and evaluation strategy in place that enables nursing managers to monitor the performances of nurses.

“The APA (Annual Performance Assessment) allows supervisors to discuss the assessment outcome with the nurses so it is an open book assessment.

“Another 251 nursing positions which is going to be filled by next year is certainly a move in a positive direction.

“At the National Nursing Meeting last month we have decided that the way forward for the Fiji Nursing Services is to develop and have its own Clinical Service Network for Nurses along with a National Strategic Plan for Nursing for the next five years,” Mrs Waqa-Ledua said.

Improving maternal health and promoting Safe Motherhood through training of the midwives is another key programme to be undertaken by the Fiji Nursing Services.

“The demand for midwifery services is accelerating year by year and we can only respond through building the midwifery numbers.

“There are close to 400 midwives in Fiji and they provide services at the major hospitals and subdivisional hospitals, as well as emergency deliveries in health centres.

“The Ministry of Health’s strategic plan articulates that for the next five years there has to be three to four midwives per 1000 population, so if we want to follow WHO (World Health Organisation) standard, based on our population, we need to have roughly over 3500 midwives in the country,” Mrs Waqa-Ledua said.