Sri Lankan Government tries to lowering the recruitment qualification in Nursing

In Sri Lanka nursing students are recruited for the nursing schools from the students who are completed their General Certificate Examination (Advanced Level) in science stream according to the “Z score”.

However, now the government is going to lower the recruitment qualification by stating that there is no adequate applicants.

Nursing is a profession which is based on scientific principles and which needs higher decision making abilities as Problem-solving, Reasoning, Intuition, Emotional Intelligence, critical and analytical thinking etc. Thus, lowering the recruitment qualification will be affected for the quality standards of the profession and also for the service out comes for the customers. Therefore, the decision made by the government in lowering recruitment criteria will create a crisis situation.

But, there are many other reasons for in availability of appropriate amount of applicants in addition to failure to provide solutions by the government to increase the demand and standards of nursing profession. Without resolving those issues and problems, the government is going to lower the recruitment qualifications to increase the intake.

The Government Nursing Officers’ Association (GNOA) as the leading nursing trade union in Sri Lanka which act for protecting nurses rights and professional standards, we are highly protesting for lowering the recruitment criteria.

We submitted our suggestions to the government and in addition to that the president of the GNOA Mr. Saman Rathnapriya held a media conference to make aware the public and nursing community on this problematic situation.

Further, a signing campaign and a poster campaign are proceeding to exhibit our protest for the decision which is the government is going to take.

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