‘Covid-19 provides a rare learning opportunity for trainee nurses’

MAMELLO SEBATANE

Maseru – The regulations and safety measures to check the further spread of Covid-19 have caused closure of schools worldwide, causing heavy disruptions to schools’ calendars and nursing schools have not spared.

The Lesotho Nurses Association (LNA) has expressed concern over disruption to nurses’ training programmes.

LNA general secretary, ’Mamonica Mokhesi, has said nurses’ training centres should be exempted form Covid-19 induced closures because student nurses need to experience working under conditions of a pandemic.

“It is not often that we get to experience a pandemic and working under conditions of Covid-19 should be a learning opportunity for student nurses to experience and acquire skills under such circumstances therefore we did not expect nursing schools to close,” she said.

Mokhesi said that since it remains unknown how long the pandemic will last, the deployment of student nurses would reduce the workforce burden in hospitals in this time of a great emergency.

“Nursing students work under supervision of already qualified nurses. We want to create strong teams of highly skilled nurses so that when we experience another pandemic or if COVID 19 prolongs for years then we would know that we have equipped them with enough practical learning in the field,” she said.