The rapid establishment of new nursing campuses countrywide is a double-edged sword. While it is good news for youth employment and brings higher education closer to home, we must also question if we are attracting the right people.
Nursing is not just another job. It is a calling that requires deep empathy and emotional strength. Today, we face a major dilemma. Are our young people entering clinics because they truly care about patients, or are they just taking advantage of a campus nearby?
Young Namibians are flooding into nursing programmes for three very different reasons:
- The Passionate Student: Driven by a genuine heart to heal and serve their communities. These students form the backbone of good healthcare.
- The Opportunity Student: Enrols simply because a campus opened in their town. It saves them money on rent and transport, making it an easy choice.
- The Point-Matcher Student: Chooses nursing because their Grade 12 points happened to match the minimum entry requirements. For them, it is a safety net against unemployment.
When we treat nursing like a standard office job, our healthcare system suffers. Nursing requires heavy emotional labour, long hours, and crowded wards. Without a true calling, the system breaks down in three ways:
- Poorer Patient Care: A lack of passion leads to cold, detached behaviour. This results in patient neglect and ruins public trust in state hospitals.
- Fast Burnout: The brutal reality of hospital shifts quickly breaks students who only joined for a stable salary, leading to high stress and burnout.
- Low Standards: Students who join just because they had the points are less likely to improve their skills or go the extra mile for patients.
To protect our healthcare system, Namibian universities and regulators must look beyond school grades and regional quotas. We need to screen applicants more carefully:
- Look Beyond Points: Universities should introduce mandatory face-to-face interviews, psychological screening, and short hospital job-shadowing trials before admitting students. This tests their emotional readiness.
- Better Career Guidance: High schools must stop promoting nursing merely as an easy path to employment. They need to teach learners about the heavy ethical responsibilities of the job.
- Stronger Supervision: The Health Professions Council of Namibia must monitor these growing campuses strictly. They need to ensure students are being taught professional ethics and good behaviour, not just technical skills.
Ultimately, expanding access to higher education must bring a noticeable, positive change in our communities. We should be seeing shorter queues at our clinics, faster and more effective treatment, and a healthier nation overall.
Without these real-world results, expanding education becomes nothing more than a commercial transaction. The institutional owners get business and status, the graduates get a job and a title, while the community gets close to nothing. A hospital bed is only as good as the nurse standing next to it. We must ensure that the doors to our nursing schools remain open only to those who have the heart, the stamina, and the passion to heal.
– Lydia Nghilundilua
