Abstract
Linguistic and cultural communication skills are essential for nurses as they are at the fore front in public and private hospitals, physicians’ offices, clinics and other outpatient care facilities. Indeed nurses provide the human touch for patients seeking medical advice at a particular medical centre before consulting a physician. Recently, the Ministry of Higher Education has released statistics on unemployment among nurses - about 8000 nursing graduates have not secured jobs. As such, a study was carried out to examine the reason for such a serious situation in Malaysia when other parts of the world are in dire need of nurses. A quantitative methodology was adopted to determine the reason for unemployment among nurses as well as to find ways to relocate these unemployed nurses to parts of the world where their service is needed. This study draws several conclusions about the unemployed nurses and ways to enhance their communication and English language skills to make them more ‘marketable’ as well as be able to execute their duties effectively at workplace. The results indicate a need for a special English language course-design for theses trained nurses.
Highlights
In Malaysia there are many private and public nursing colleges
Linguistic and cultural communication skills are essential for nurses as they are at the fore front in public and private hospitals, physicians’ offices, clinics and other outpatient care facilities
30% lamented that there was no proper channel to obtain information on job availability. 15% of respondents shared that there were far too many nursing colleges churning out too many nurses which did not match the demand for nurses in the country
Summary
In Malaysia there are many private and public nursing colleges. Statistics show that private colleges alone produce about 1,200 trained nurses though there are only 1000 to 1500 nursing jobs in private sector each year. This makes Malaysia, apart from the Philippines, as one of the countries in Asia to export nurses to countries like Saudi Arabia, Middle East, Australia and New Zealand. The government hospitals mostly hire public university graduates while private hospitals employ their own nurse trainees, for example Pantai Medical Centre has its own nursing college which serves as a feed centre to the hospital. As the production surplus the demand, this results in many fresh graduate nurses being jobless
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