Singapore — Earlier this month, Senior Minister of State for Health Janil Puthucheary alluded to a shortage of healthcare workers in a ministerial statement, where he noted a rising rate of resignations among both local and foreign healthcare workers.
He noted that about 1,500 healthcare workers had resigned between January and June of this year.
Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, around 2,000 resigned yearly.
On Nov 6, The Straits Times (ST) reported that nursing students in their final year from Nanyang Polytechnic and Ngee Ann Polytechnic are being tapped to support the healthcare workforce, with their ten-week assignments to hospitals moved up from their slated schedule of December to November.
And on Wednesday (Nov 25), ST reported that the healthcare workers’ shortage has gotten so bad that a private hospital group now offers as much as $12,000 as a finder’s fee for its staff who succeed in recruiting experienced nurses to sign on.
Recruiting a new nursing graduate would result in a finder’s fee of at least $3,600.
For the first time in over 20 years, the country saw a decrease in the number of its nurses in 2020.
While the number of registered nurses grew by 45, the number of enrolled nurses, who are supervised by registered nurses, fell by 617, for a net loss of 572 nurses, ST added.
In 2020, there were a total of 2,356 new registered nurses and 661 enrolled nurses who started working in hospitals and clinics.
Mr Puthucheary noted in his Nov 1 ministerial statement that almost 500 foreign doctors and nurses resigned in the first half of this year.
The global demand for nurses has worked against Singapore’s favour. Since they have a very small chance of getting permanent residency in Singapore, some try their luck in countries such as Canada.
ST quoted the chief operating officer of IHH Healthcare Singapore, Dr Noel Yeo, as saying that the rate of the resignation of nurses had been especially high this year, which explains the finder’s fee offer.
“Many of our foreign staff have emigrated to another country or returned to their home towns. Local staff who left said they were burned out from the long work hours and needed a break.
At present, we are 500 nurses and 100 patient care associates (ancillary staff to augment nursing roles) short of full strength.”
Last month, a number of healthcare workers weighed in on a Reddit thread titled “Healthcare workers in Singapore, how is the situation really like in hospitals?” wherein the poster asked for some “some insider’s perspective as to how overwhelmed (or otherwise) public hospitals are at the moment.”
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