Following the second wave of COVID-19, hiring of nurses on a temporary basis has gone up substantially due to demand from vaccination drives and home-care services provided by private hospitals, a senior official of staffing company TeamLease Services said.
“New hiring models are emerging since the second wave [started],” said Balasubramanian A, vice president & head — Healthcare, TeamLease Services Ltd.. “Since there is a large requirement of nurses for accelerating the vaccination programme, a lot of healthcare providers are hiring nurses on a temporary basis. Because the vaccination drive can last for maximum nine months, they are not hiring nurses [as part of the] payroll,”
He said hospitals, especially large chains, are looking to double their nurse count to reach out to more patients outside their premises. Because of the pandemic, senior citizens are preferring to get treated at their homes and this has created more demand for trained nurses.
“All our healthcare clients/hospitals have said they would hire more purely to cater to the additional health-at-home demand. Here also, hiring is done on temporary basis,” he said, adding the home-care model is here to stay, though in a curtailed form.
He said an estimated 7 lakh new nurses are believed to have been hired at a salary range of ₹15,000-₹22,000. Very senior nurses are paid about ₹60,000 a month,
“Every year, 3.5 lakh new nursing students pass out and all of them have been absorbed due to the demand. To bridge the demand-supply gap the government has also allowed final year nursing students to take up employment; thus an additional 3.5 lakh have joined the job market,” he said.
This is in addition to 30 lakh nurses registered in the country, of which 25 lakh may be working.