Patients say they take a whole day for medical tests as doctors and nurses struggle to serve increasing of patients at the medical facilities across the country
The shortage of nurses at public hospitals is curtailing provision of services, leading to long queues at the facilities.
The country faces a shortage of medical personnel estimated to be 10,000 nurses to plug a shortfall occasioned by the fast expansion of health facilities under government plan to deliver universal healthcare by 2024.
This continue to subject personnel, especially in urban healthcare facilities and those in secondary cities to pressure to handle the ever increasing number of patients seeking medical attention.
For instance, at Muhima Hospital in Kigali, a patient has to wait for diagnostics results for a whole day.
“They took me for medical tests yesterday. I arrived here at 6am hoping that I would be among the first to be served but there are so many patients. They said doctors are busy and we have to wait,” one of the patients on the queue told Rwanda Today.
At the University Teaching Hospital of Butare (CHUB) in Huye district, one nurse can attend to over 50 patients in one shift.
Steven Ndayisaba, a senior nurse at the hospital says the workload does not only overwhelm them but also limit their ability to improve their career.
“I enrolled in an online course recently to advance myself academically but I have not logged in for two weeks. Sometimes I work 12 hours straight. If I use my resting hours to study, I might burn-out. Many of my colleagues opt to quit and focus on studies. I might end up doing the same,” Mr Ndayisaba said.
CHUB hospital gains between two to five new nurses a year who, in most instances, don’t stay longer. The number of nurses has remained between 15-20 for years.
The hospital gets up to 100 new patients every day. A 2018 survey by the Rwanda nurses and midwives union on their members’ working indicated that despite working overtimes, the national standard of nurse to bed ratio still was not met in some units of clinical services, leading to the increase in workload.
Gaps in staffing were singled out as the reason patients' needs were unmet, definitely affecting the quality of services across some of the 43 hospitals surveyed under the latest Accreditation Performance Progress Assessment Report carried out in November 2019.