Pretoria - More than 100 vacancies are in the process of being filled at the Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital, according to the Gauteng Health Department.
"The hospital's human resources department is at different levels of filling 92 nursing posts and 48 posts for medical doctors. These health workers will be an addition to 598 medical doctors, 2 158 nurses and 311 allied workers, who are currently employed by the hospital," said department spokesperson Simon Zwane on Tuesday.
Zwane added that the process of filling posts was negatively affected by the scarcity of skills in the country and to address this, the department was considering recruiting professionals from outside the country.
"The department is still filling posts using the retention strategy on clinical critical posts in which walk-in applications are considered, this is done over and above advertising due to scarce skills."
As another initiative to increase the number of health workers, a total of 1 355 new nurses were enrolled in January 2012.
Currently, there are 575 nurses in basic training at four universities and 4 158 nurses in training on basic courses and 780 post basic nurses at four nursing colleges. The planned intake for enrolled nurses, second year of training, and this year is 268.
There are currently 153 vacant posts for doctors, 277 for nurses and 76 for allied workers. - SAnews.gov.za
