Medical universities admission capacity for nursing students has increased from 6,000 in 2014 to 12,000 in 2016. The aim of the two-fold increase is to compensate for the shortage of nursing staff, said Mohammad Mirza Beigi, deputy director of nursing services at the Health Ministry.
Lack of adequate nurses in hospitals is hindering the provision of quality nursing care. “At present, there is a shortage of 140,000 nurses in the hospitals across the country,” he said, ISNA reported. Nearly 10,000 assistant nurses are being trained by the ministry to be employed at state-run hospitals by the end of the current year in March 2017.
Currently, the ratio of nurses per hospital bed is just 0.4, and there are only 9,000 head-nurses in the 550 state-run hospitals in the country.
