‘Inject pace in nursing school works’

HEALTH Minister Chitalu Chilufya has directed the Copperbelt Province Health administration to speed up the remaining works at the Roan School of Nursing in Luanshya to enroll 150 students this month.

Speaking during a visit to Luanshya , Dr Chilufya  said he wanted to see the school commence work in a month because the infrastructure was already in place and offering courses in midwifery.

He directed that all the 150 general nursing students should come from the Copperbelt, with the majority from Luanshya so that youth unemployment in the area could be reduced.

Dr Chilufya made the announcement in Luanshya when he visited the learning institution on his national inspection tour of health facilities under construction and those beirng upgraded.

“Youths are a priority and we want to ensure they are catered for. I want to see 100 youths enrolled for general nursing training and an additional 50 who will be under e-learning programme which is the same as those in full-time,” he says.

Currently, since the introduction of e-learning in nursing in 2014, five schools namely Livingstone, Chipata, Mufulira, Kitwe and Ndola were selected to offer the course. Luanshya will be the sixth. 

He expressed happiness with the manner the expansion works of Roan School of Nursing School were progressing, saying the project was in line with the 2017 African Union (AU) theme of promoting demographic dividends to the youths.

He says Zambia was on the right track to achieving the objectives of the AU theme and commended the contractor who is reported to have gone beyond his contractual allocation complete almost 90 percent works.

Dr Chilufya says he was overwhelmed to note that the local contractor had gone out of his way to see to it that government’s vision of offering quality health education was attained.

He said Roan Hospital was also being modernised into a fully-fledged modern training hospital in line with the vision of President Edgar Lungu.

Roan School of Nursing Principal Tutor Ronald Katongo said the nursing school currently had 140 students.

Dr Chilufya also visited the newly-constructed Roan Township Maternity Clinic, Section Three Clinic, Chibolya Pediatric Clinic and Chaisa Urban Health Centre.

He said the government would soon release money for the completion of the health facilities.

He said while some works could have taken long to complete, he was impressed that the majority of the projects being upgraded were within the design time-table and would soon be offering the needed quality medical services.