Kerala - Kochi   

A tall order for mentally fatigued

KOCHI: Even as the number of people with mental disorders is going up in the State, there are just a few psychiatric nurses to offer any comfort. One of the five specialty nursing subjects, psychiatric nursing has only ten postgraduate seats in the government medical colleges in the State.

With high demand of psychiatric nurses in the U.S., Europe and other developed countries, psychiatric nurses are often selected for hospitals and universities abroad, leaving a wide gap in the need for the faculty here.

There are no postgraduate seats in private nursing colleges and the undergraduate course in the subject is run on an understanding with transfer of faculty from one college to another. Of the 10 seats, six are at Kozhikode Medical College and four at Kottayam Medical College.

The psychiatric nursing specialty could not be started at Thiruvananthapuram Medical College due to lack of faculty, said Salomi George, Deputy Director (Nursing), Directorate of Medical Education. Altogether there were only five faculty members in the medical colleges, four in Kozhikode (one is a Principal) and one in Kottayam.

“There are a total of 80 postgraduate seats in five specialties in nursing, which are Medical-Surgical, Community Medicine, Paediatric, Psychiatric and Obstetric and Gynaecology. Of these seats, 28 are in Thiruvananthapuram, 22 in Kottayam and 30 in Kozhikode.”

Prof. George said that since the number of nursing colleges in the private sector (70) had gone up, there would be a simultaneous increase in the numbers of nurses taking up psychiatry as a specialty.

“We hope the acute scarcity of teachers and nurses in the specialty will come down in a couple of years,” she said.

All these issues and more were discussed and 33 scientific papers presented at the seventh annual national conference of the Indian Society of Psychiatric Nurses that concluded here recently. Psychiatry is the only specialty in nursing that has an all-India association.

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