Manama: A master’s degree programme in nursing will be launched next year in Qatar to make the nursing profession more attractive to Qataris.

Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC) and the University of Calgary-Qatar (UC-Q) said that they would start the programme to open opportunities for Qataris.
According to Dr Nabila Almeer, executive director of nursing at HMC and chairperson of Nursing Scientific Committee, only six per cent of the 6,000 nurses from 50 countries working at HMC are Qataris.

"The lack of interest’ among young Qatari men and women in nursing is one of the biggest challenges facing Qatar’s premier health institution," she told the Qatar Tribune daily on the sidelines of the Qatar Health Congress and Exhibition in Doha.

"We need to improve the education programme for nurses to open opportunities for them for higher employment positions and better benefits. Together with UC-Q, we are planning a master’s degree in nursing hopefully next year as a recruitment strategy.”

Part of the strategy will be improving the salary and benefit schemes for HMC nurses.

“I think because of the opportunities in other sectors which offer more attractive compensation, young Qatari men and women are more attracted to those professions than to nursing," she said..

Almeer insisted that being a nurse was "a very difficult task and a person who decides to be in this field must genuinely love the job."

"We want to see more Qatari men and women in this profession and that is why we are also looking at increasing the salary package and improving our benefit schemes to lure them into this field,” she said.

HMC will need about 10,000 to 12,000 more nurses with the opening of seven new hospitals in the coming years for the Hamad Medical City, the second biggest healthcare development in the Middle East, slated to be completed in 2012, the daily reported on Monday.

According to Almeer, HMC will also advocate continuous education programmes for employees, particularly educating them on evidence-based healthcare and the practice of making clinical decisions based on the best available evidence gained through scientific methods.
Dr Almeer led the inauguration of the nursing track for the annual Qatar Health Congress.

Apart from sharing best practices in the field of nursing, the sessions highlighted the importance and benefits of evidence-based practice among health workers.