As the Western world looks for ways to stave off a massive impending nursing shortage, the Czech Republic has come up with a novel way to attract nurses from other, richer countries: free boob jobs for everyone. I’m not sure if this makes the Czech Republic a better place to be a nurse, but it’s clearly not a bad place to be a patient.
Less interestingly, nurses also get free German lessons and five weeks of vacation as part of the enticement package.
The head of one Czech clinic says the cosmetic surgery “helps to improve the morale of both our employees and our patients” — and, incidentally, is a heck of a lot more popular than the language courses.
From the Times:
The nursing shortage is part of a worrying global trend that doctors and nurses say is hurting patient care and potentially risking lives. In Britain, hospitals have been forced to temporarily eliminate dozens of beds because of the dearth of nurses, while in the United States, the government predicts there could be a shortage of one million nurses by 2016. In the Czech Republic, the lack of qualified nurses recently forced a hospital in Brno, the country’s largest city after Prague, to shut its intensive care unit.
[…] Irena Pejznochova, spokeswoman of the Czech Nurses Association, said […] innovative incentives were being introduced because nurses worked 12-hour shifts, were underpaid and could not even prescribe an aspirin without a doctor’s permission. “The problem is that the public still perceives nurses as they were represented in communist-era television shows: as low-level workers who emptied bed pans and cleaned hospital rooms,” she said.
Image via Spike.
3 responses so far ↓
1 maya // Jun 21, 2009 at 11:51 pm
uh maybe gov’ts should concern themselves with improving the working conditions of nurses instead of upping western corporate beauty practices
2 Adar // Jun 23, 2009 at 9:56 pm
I agree with you Maya. If nurses salary is enough and benefits are good, hospital administrations need not offer such package. Sadly, they even have to buy their own nursing uniforms.
3 Asher Vijay // Feb 16, 2011 at 1:16 am
“Corporate beauty practices”? Is that really the best term?
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