Looking to work as a nurse in Cape Town.

[declan o'riordan]

Hi,
I am moving to Cape Town with my wife next year and want to work as a nurse (substance misuse/ psychiatric nursing), and was wondering if anyone could offer me any advice about their own experiences of finding work in these or silmilar areas. my wife is a doctor and was born and raised in Cape Town, and i have visited there a number of times, but i am aware that it is one thing to visit a country, but quite an other to live there!. I am Irish, but have lived in london for the last 13 years and have worked as a nurse mostly within the substance misuse field. Any advice or thoughts would be much appreciated.
thanks.

[neilmeyer]

There is such a immense shortage of skilled labor in SA that you should have no problems getting a job. The one negative thing for foreign medical workers is that you have to do a few community service years.

This is also imposed on locally qualified medical students. The thing about those years is that you will take a serious financial knock. The positive thing is that the people that will be using your services are the poor. They wouldn't be able to see a doctor if it were not for these doctors in their community services years. So the positive thing from these years is that you probably would get a immense satisfaction of doing the community you work in a great favor.

I can assure you that when you finish these two years (I think) that you would probably never worry about money again. The private hospitals pay huge amounts of money for doctors and nurses. So your standard of living here would probably be very high.

I would recommend that you visit the Healths professional board of South Africa's website to get all the details

I hope this helped you.