Reflections on the Effect of the COVID-19 Lockdown in South Africa: The Case Study of Nursing Colleges

Abstract

The World Health Organization says that 21st-century global trends require that traditional and conservative approaches to health care delivery including its mode of education be seriously reconsidered if health global needs are to be met. Moreover, educational institutions are sources of growth, development, and innovation. The emergence of the unprecedented novel coronavirus in 2019 and its related measures to contain its global spread resulted in lockdowns in South Africa, affecting education across all levels when innovative measures were employed. In the nursing profession, the pinch of such lockdowns affected Nursing Education Institutions in various ways due to the emergency shift from physical contact to virtual teaching and learning. In the event of the COVID-19 pandemic, most countries were on national lockdown for more than a month thus affecting teaching and learning. The emergency shift to online teaching and learning was applied across all disciplines to preserve the academic calendar. The aim of this paper is to present a desktop literature review to highlight the implications and the effect of the emergency shift from face-to-face to online teaching and learning among poorly resourced institutions offering nursing programmes in South Africa. Its main objective is to analyse the position of Nursing Education Institutions and their readiness to use virtual teaching and learning platforms in order to achieve its throughput in students’ course completion which feeds into the nursing human resources of the country. A systematic literature review from indexed journals, professional organisations, books, and reports on Google Scholar, departmental websites, and electronic libraries will be engaged to draw arguments, analysis, conclusions, and recommendations. The paper also presents the implications of delayed course completion on student nurses, the general public health consumers, and the health system of the country. The conclusions drawn are that the Nursing Colleges in South Africa are generally under-resourced and not ready for online teaching