KARACHI: Despite the Sindh government’s substantial financial investment in training nurses, most of the province’s newly graduated nurses are forced to seek employment abroad due to the severe shortage of available positions in the public healthcare sector.
This growing issue highlights the province’s struggle to retain trained healthcare professionals.
Each year, approximately 1,500 nurses graduate from both public and private nursing schools in Sindh, completing four years of academic training followed by one year of internship. However, only about 400 to 500 of these graduates manage to secure government jobs in public hospitals. This leaves the majority of them with few choices other than to seek employment in Gulf countries and Europe, where the salaries and benefits are far more attractive.
The Sindh government spends more than 1.6 billion rupees annually to provide nursing students with a stipend of 30,000 rupees per month. Over the course of five years, this investment amounts to nearly 8.2 billion rupees. Yet, despite this substantial expenditure, the province’s healthcare system has only 5,000 positions for nurses, far fewer than the 5,500 nurses graduating each year.
Many of these nurses, having been trained at considerable cost to the government, end up working abroad. The situation has reached the point where skilled healthcare professionals, trained at taxpayer expense, contribute to foreign healthcare systems instead of their own. This exodus has left Sindh’s hospitals grappling with a critical shortage of trained nursing staff, further exacerbating the already high demand for healthcare services in the province.
The current nurse-to-patient ratio in Sindh’s public hospitals is increasingly concerning. In general wards, a nurse is often responsible for 12 to 15 patients, while in Intensive Care Units (ICU), one nurse can be tasked with managing up to six patients at once. Experts estimate that the province is facing a shortage of around 15,000 nurses.
While the Sindh government has taken steps to address the issue, including launching evening nursing courses in an effort to increase the number of trained nurses, the number of available government positions remains woefully inadequate. With the annual influx of graduates exceeding the number of available jobs, many nurses are left with no choice but to pursue better opportunities abroad.
Ijaz Kalhri, Chairman of the Young Nursing Association, called for immediate action, urging the government to create more nursing positions to prevent further brain drain. He stressed that the rising patient numbers in public hospitals make the urgent hiring of an additional 15,000 nurses a necessity. Kalhri also criticized the disparity in the healthcare workforce, where there are significantly fewer nurses than doctors, contributing to the migration of skilled nurses.
Irshad Abbasi, Principal of Liaquatabad Nursing College, pointed out that under the guidance of Sindh Health Minister Dr. Azra Pechuho, evening classes for nurses have been introduced as a step toward addressing the shortage. However, experts warn that without increasing job opportunities within the province, these efforts may not be sufficient to retain trained nurses.
