AKEL said on Thursday it would not vote for Health Ministry plans to make it easier to hire nurses from outside the European Union, while MPs from DISY and DIKO raised concerns about pay, collective agreements, Greek language skills and patient safety.
The proposed changes, discussed by the House Health Committee, aim to ease the registration and employment of non-EU nurses to address the shortage of nursing staff in the health system.
They would cap such nurses at 10 per cent of staff per hospital and grant an initial two-year licence to practise. They also set Greek language requirements, one of the main points of disagreement.
Health Ministry representative Karolina Stylianou defended the changes, citing allowances, campaigns and contacts with universities.
Party concerns
AKEL MP Marina Nicolaou linked her party’s position to the lack of guarantees on pay. Addressing the employers’ side, she said that as long as they refused to apply collective agreements to secure salaries, it was “a no from us”. She also asked why different language requirements should apply to doctors and to nurses.
Committee chair Savia Orphanidou of DISY raised the issue of about 1,400 nurses reported to be no longer working in the profession. She asked why the figure had not alarmed the Health Ministry over the years and what had been done to bring them back. Collective agreements cannot be made compulsory, she noted, but they help maintain good relations between employers and employees, and she questioned how the different positions could be reconciled.
DISY MP Giorgos Pamborides challenged the view that the answer lies mainly in recruiting staff from abroad. Unless employers paid for nurses to come back, he told them, “you won’t have the staff you want”. He was also responding to calls from employers for the cap to be raised to 30 or even 50 per cent.
His party colleague Charalambos Pazaros asked to be briefed on what the health minister had done to bring nurses back into the profession.
DIKO MP Andreas Apostolou expressed serious reservations and asked for clarification on how Greek language skills would be certified and how workers would be protected. Although collective agreements cannot be legally imposed, he said, it must be ensured that the 10 per cent quota is not used to exploit workers.
Employers want a higher cap
The Cyprus Employers and Industrialists Federation (OEB) said the shortages were preventing private hospitals from operating at full capacity. It cited a survey showing that the weighted average salary of nurses in the private sector is close to 3,000 euros a month.
Marios Karaiskakis, president of the Pancyprian Association of Private Hospitals, estimated that a 10 per cent cap would in practice allow 100 to 150 hires, against 300 to 350 under a 30 per cent cap.
