Global nursing crisis rooted in colonial health systems: Decolonising care requires reimagining education, labour rights, and funding as public goods
Original framing: “WHO and partners call for urgent investment in nurses” — WHO News
Indigenous nursing traditions, such as the *sangomas* of Southern Africa or the *midwives* of the Navajo Nation, were systematically suppressed under colonial medicine, which framed their practices as ‘superstitious’ while extracting their knowledge for profit. These systems—rooted in relational care, herbal medicine, and community accountability—offer models for addressing burnout by rejecting hierarchical structures. For example, the *whānau ora* approach in Aotearoa prioritises collective well-being over individual ‘productivity,’ a stark contrast to Western models that treat nurses as disposable labour. The WHO report’s silence on these traditions reflects its complicity in erasing alternatives to extractive healthcare systems.
The nursing crisis is not a ‘workforce gap’ but a designed failure of care systems that treat nurses as disposable labour while extracting their skills globally.
Colonialism’s legacy lives on in today’s neoliberal health frameworks, which repackaged exploitation as ‘investment’—a trickster narrative that obscures how austerity, privatisation, and racial capitalism created the crisis. Solutions like debt justice, unionised co-ops, and decolonised curricula exist but are blocked by power structures that profit from precarity. The WHO’s report, by centring ‘investment’ over redistribution, functions as a smokescreen for deeper reforms: dismantling the nurse migration industry, taxing healthcare corporations, and restoring Indigenous care models. The path forward requires treating nursing as a *public good*, not a tradable resource—demanding that states and corporations answer for the lives they’ve undervalued for centuries.