The Democratic Nursing Organisation of SouthAfrica, Denosa, is urging its Eastern Cape members to no longer perform non-nursing functions.
The union said in a statement on Sunday that Denosa "hereby calls on all nurses in the province to withdraw their labour from performing non-nursing duties as a cover-up for gross shortage of staff in facilities. This will save nurses from being implicated in the avalanche of litigations."
The union resolved at a meeting of its Provincial Executive Committee this past weekend to "mobilise nurses to withdraw their labour from executing non-nursing duties."
"DENOSA is calling on nurses to focus on their nursing duties, or the Scope of Practice as stipulated by South African Nursing Council (SANC)," the union said.
"In the past years, DENOSA has seen the demise of nursing care in the public sector because nurses are executing non-nursing duties as a result of shortage of clinical and non-clinical staff.The most critical element in nursing, the patient record-keeping, has been greatly compromised. Nurses do not do proper patient record-writing because there is no adequate time to do that," said Denosa EC spokesperson Khaya Sodidi.
"The poor patient record-keeping results in litigation of nurses when there is patient incident reported to the management and SANC. During disciplinary proceedings, nurses find themselves exposed and on their own."
"The only way for nurses to protect themselves from this malpractice is to refrain from doing non-nursing duties and focus on proper nursing care, including record-keeping," he said.
Sodidi said that DENOSA is calling on nurses"to do comprehensive patient care when they are attending to patients and resist from doing non-nursing duties. If they encounter any problem or intimidation from management for working strictly within their scope o fpractice, they must inform DENOSA immediately."
