World Nursing Day was celebrated on every 25 May across the globe to highlight the importance of Nurses in healthcare; however in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa there was hardly any program arranged to pay tributes to nurses.
According to the data of Federal Public Health for 10,475 patients one doctor is available while for 3646 patients one nurse is there to help.
According to the countrywide data of 2007 for 150m population only 43,644 nurses were available while for 3260 patients only one nurse was available.
In 2010 there were 69, 313 professionally trained nurses in Pakistan.
As per latest statistics there are 3669 nurses performing their duties in different government and private hospitals in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa against a need of almost 6137 nurses. Which means there is a dearth of nurses in KP and around 3500 more nurses are required to be hired to ease the workload on the nurses currently doing their duties.
In developing countries for every ten percentage population 89 nurses will be available to give them health care facilities.
According to the data, 8 million, eight thousand and nine hundred and twenty nurses was serving across the globe to provide health care facilities to the patients while Europe is on the top position where 59 million and forty thousand nurses were doing their job to give health care facilities to the patients.
According to the Pakistan Nursing Council one nurse is for five patients while according to the health observers one nurse is provide health care facilities up to 60 patients in different hospital in Pakistan.
In Lady Reading Hospital which is the busiest hospital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa where majority of bomb blast patients were treated as total 529 nurses while 3500 nurses were needed on emergency level.
Farrukh Jalil President of Nursing Association said that indeed nurses staff of the hospital was most vulnerable people as they were always busy to provide health care facilities to the people but still our society give not such respect to the nurses as they needed.
He also added that every government when came into power give promise that the nurses staff will be regularize as the previous health minister also promise with us but the government spend five year but not fulfill their promise, he added.
Farrukh also added that nursing staff give 12 hour duty while some nurses who were working with the profession for the last thirty years but still they were not regularize and demanded for their service structure, adding that in Punjab the nurse salary is 40,000 while in KP they were only receiving 15000 salary.
A senior nurse in LRH said on the condition to be not mention her name said that she was serving for the last fifteen years but still the behavior of the people towards nurses is rough and not give them such respect as they needed.
She also added that whenever a bomb blast occurred in Peshawar most of the people were visiting to the hospital and were abusing the nurses to give them health facilities to their patients as in that time every nurse was busy to saving the life of patients.
She further added that it is matter of concern that those people who was serving and saving the lives of other people was deprived for their basic needs, adding that as the new government of Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf would be established in the coming days so we expect that they will solve all of our problems.
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