The Prague Post Online: News: Nursing shortage turns critical

August 22nd, 2008

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Nursing shortage turns critical

Meanwhile, reforms under way to help labor market

By Ondřej Bouda
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
July 16th, 2008 issue

The labor market is struggling in many areas, and the healthcare sector has been among the hardest hit. Until recently, for example, only Prague had a shortage of nurses. However, the problem has spread, prompting hospital directors to look for solutions abroad.

“We need to find 120 nurses and there aren’t any available here,” said Miloslav Ludvík, director of the University Hospital Motol, one of the largest hospitals in the country. “I was recently in Vietnam to see if we could import nurses from there.” While he praised the Vietnamese health system as being one of the best in the region, he conceded that the language barrier poses a significant challenge to bringing Vietnamese nurses to the Czech Republic.

“Every nurse interested in working here will have to pass a Czech proficiency test,” he said.

There are no official national statistics on the nursing shortage, but the declining numbers aren’t difficult to understand.

“Just look at the hours we have to work and the pittance we get paid,” said Miloslava, a nurse at a hospital in Prague. She starts work around 5 a.m. and continues long into the afternoon, providing patient care and completing large amounts of paperwork. Her salary is 14,000 Kč ($937) before taxes a month, leaving her chronically short on funds. “Most of my classmates have left nursing and gone on to become secretaries or clerks. We wanted to take care of other people, but once you start a family, you have to take care of them, and that’s impossible on our salaries,” she said.

Besides the health sector, plenty of other markets face staffing shortages. In an attempt to bolster this struggling labor force, Labor and Social Affairs Minister Petr Nečas is planning the largest reform of the market since the fall of communism.

The European Union has criticized the Czech Republic several times for its “unadaptable” work force. The Czech National Bank also regularly cites shortcomings within the labor market as one of the reasons the country is not ready for the eurozone. The planned reform aims to create a more flexible and competitive labor market.

Part of the plan is to import 750,000 foreign workers within the next 20 years, to fill the jobs Czechs are rejecting.

“At the moment, we have around 300,000 unemployed people and 150,000 free jobs,” Nečas said, pointing out that not all unemployed Czechs necessarily want to work. “We have reached limit values for the labor market and, since the population has negative growth, we will eventually have to fill the gap,” Nečas said.

In 2007, some 73,000 foreigners came to work here, and their numbers are growing constantly. There are currently around 272,500 foreign workers according to statistics published by the Labor and Social Affairs Ministry at the beginning of July. They come mostly from Ukraine, Slovakia and Poland to work predominantly in manual labor and service industries.

Under the reforms, foreigners will be able to obtain green cards, which will grant them access to jobs that Czechs and other EU citizens do not fill. “Mainly, we want to decrease the bureaucracy involved. We cannot survive without foreign workers; we should make it easier for them to work here and make them feel more welcome,” Nečas said.

Some experts disagree with the minister, pointing to other European countries currently experiencing social unrest because of large unemployed segments of foreign minorities.

“The current European trend is to motivate older people not to retire, encourage parents of young children to have at least a part-time job and provide them with services that allow them to work while raising their children and re-integrate unemployed people,” said Miroslav Ševčík, a professor at the University of Economics in Prague. “Importing a foreign labor force can cause long-term problems such as the issues France is currently dealing with,” Ševčík added.

Also under the reforms, unemployed people will receive more benefits, but for a shorter period of time. After six months of unemployment benefits, people will have to take a re-qualification course. If they fail to find a job even after the course, their benefits will be adjusted based on the number of hours they work for local councils as volunteers.

The reforms will also give employers more freedom while hiring and firing employees. “This will allow people to switch jobs more easily,” Nečas said.

Ondřej Bouda can be reached at news@praguepost.com

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