As Nepali nurses weigh up the benefits of an NHS salary, any staff drain will worsen shortages in the country’s creaking healthcare system
The emergency department at Kathmandu’s Bir hospital is already packed with patients, but still they come, in wheelchairs and on stretchers, filling every space. A man is lifted off a bed, still attached to three tubes, to make room for a new arrival. Another is handed an oxygen mask from a fellow patient. Security guards man the sliding metal entrance gates to try to control the flow.
“It’s very difficult. Always busy – even more than this. Sometimes, [there’s] two or three to a bed,” says nurse Shalu Chand, squeezing between two patients on trolleys as she rushes to fit a saline drip. “The workload is too much and the salary too little.”
Written by Pete Pattisson and Pramod Acharya in Kathmandu and Malangwa
This news first appeared on https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/mar/14/if-we-leave-nepal-will-suffer-embattled-hospitals-fear-impact-of-uk-nhs-job-offers under the title “‘If we leave, Nepal will suffer’: embattled hospitals fear impact of UK job offers”. Bolchha Nepal is not responsible or affiliated towards the opinion expressed in this news article.
