Pago Pago, AMERICAN SAMOA — Newly appointed Director General of Health in Samoa, Aiono Dr Alec Ekeroma said their nursing curriculum is acceptable to institutions in Samoa, and that every country has its own curriculum.

Samoa Observer reported that Samoa needs at least 500 more nurses to have full capacity in terms of staffing at hospitals in the country.

This is according to Aiono in response to comments by LBJ Hospital CEO Moefa’auo Bill Emmsley, who said they were not hiring Samoan nurses, because the standard of their qualifications did not match the U.S standards.

However the hospital was hiring nurses from Fiji and the Philippines.

Dr Ekeroma said Samoa is short of 500 nurses and it is a blessing that they were not being ‘pinched’ by American Samoa to fill their labor needs.

“We are short of nurses in Samoa and the fact that they do not recognize our nursing qualification and training may be a blessing [in disguise] because it means that they can’t take the few nurses that we have in Samoa," Aiono said.

"We are short 500 nurses."

As reported yesterday Moefa’auo said initially they had plans to hire from Samoa, Fiji and the Philippines. Then a special meeting between LBJ’s top officials and ASCC’s Nursing Program director convened on or about September 9, 2022, to establish the feasibility of LBJ‘s plan from an “educational, credentialing, and licensing” standpoint before the plan was launched.

“Naturally, on top of LBJ’s agenda was the recruitment of nurses from Samoa firstly for obvious reasons — advantages in language and culture, which are highly desirable for LBJ’s purposes.

“Thus, when initially queried about Samoa’s nursing curriculum, we were informed by the program administrator that, ‘Samoa’s nursing curriculum is not equivalent to ours because American Samoa’s curriculum is based on American Standards thus, subject to additional evaluation’.”

“At the end of the day it is not actually where the degree comes from, it is what the people who have the degree actually do with it. So you can have people come from Australia and New Zealand with degrees and not perform in our country,” Aiono Dr Ekeroma said.

“And yet you can have people from here who go there and sit their exams in a different system with different standards and are now leading nursing departments and wards in those countries.

“And as you know, nurses are in high demand, with nurses going across to Australia for age care. We are training our nurses for our purposes,” he said.

The National University of Samoa (NUS) is working very hard to make sure that their programs are accredited with the Samoa Qualifications Authority next year. This would allow the Samoan nursing qualifications to be recognized in more nations, he said.

Aiono said the university's nursing school was striving to do better and had worked to lift its capacity.

“As you know, we got our first PhD in nursing, who is also the head of school. We have a few Masters teachers here, but we are trying to fill in the capacity of our nursing school,” he added.

“American Samoa is a different jurisdiction; they have their own standards, and it is up to them. I know they were talking about sending more of their students to NUS to train in other areas.”