PESHAWAR: Students of nursing schools in Peshawar and elsewhere in the province have been used by the senior nurses working in wards and schools to put pressure on the government for resolution of their demands such as service structure and allowances.

The students were brought on roads by the senior nurses to strengthen their protest sit-in held on June 3. The same day, the health department issued show cause notices and sent home 150 student nurses for violating their bond according to which they cannot take part in protests.According to rules of the Pakistan Nursing Council, the regulatory body for nursing in Pakistan, the student nurses should not be only struck off from schools, but also blacklisted for admission in any institutions, both government and private. The health department had issued notices asking the students mostly in Lady Reading Hospital, Khyber Teaching Hospital and Hayatabad Medical Complex who took part in the protest to send their parents to reaffirm the undertaking that their daughters wouldn`t become part of protests.

There was no students-related demand for the protest. The demands included service structure, one-time promotion and increase in health pro-fessional allowance of nurses, but the students participated because they work in the wards and schools under senior nurses, therefore, obeyed them readily.

`At this point the government can terminate and blacklist them, but they have been issued with notices and we hope student nurses will stick to their undertaking in future,` an official said.

From Monday, they would be allowed to resume their work at schools, he said.

There are 1,250 students in 10 nursing schools in the province who are admitted after passing secondary school certificate examination in the science group. They are supposed to take classes and get three-year diploma in general nursing and one-year diploma in midwifery during the four years at the schools.

They are appointed as staff nurses in government hospitals after completion of diploma.

The health department delegated powers to control nursing schools to the PeshawarHealth Service Academy in 1999 with a view to enhance their academic and technical skills, but the situation remained unchanged.

The Pakistan Nursing Council is starting a degree programme for nurses for which they would be inducted after FSc from 2018.

Currently, after six months of their admission in schools, they are deployed in wards where they administer injections, drips and perform other medical work unauthorisedly.

The students are not allowed medicalwork and can do nursing care of patients, including taking care of personal hygiene, washing of hand, mouths and hair, etc of the patients and bedding and clothing.

As a rule, only on-job nurses are required to follow the patients` treatment chart and give drugs or prepare patients for the operations and look after their recovery at the operation theatre and collect blood samples for investigation. It is the duty of an employed nurse to record temperature, etc of the patients,but that too under the supervision of a doctor.Farrulch Jamil, president of KP Nursing Association, told Dawn that not only student nurses, but the staffers were also not authorised to go on strike, but the government`s attitude towards 55,000 nurses was not soft like doctors.

The students work in the hospital in addition to their study because of severe shortage of staff nurses at the hospitals, he said.

Mr Jamil said that the stipend of nursing students was only Rs5,000 which they should be increased. About 80 per cent of the nurses come from poor families, he said.