Government is reportedly planning to recruit unemployed SHS graduates as replacement for trained and licensed professionals in the healthcare sector.
The information comes on the back of worrying reports that many healthcare professionals are joining the bandwagon to seek greener pastures abroad.
The Ghana Registered Nurses and Midwives Association (GRNMA) made a startling revelation in June this year that in the first quarter of 2022 alone, over 3,000 trained nurses and midwives left the shores of Ghana to seek greener pastures abroad.
To compound the situation, many doctors and nurses are also said to be unemployed and at home after completing their housemanship due to the government’s failure to absorb them into the healthcare system.
Minority members on the Health Committee of Parliament who made this revelation at a press conference on Thursday, September 8, 2022, described the attempt as very dangerous.
Ranking Member of the Committee, Kwabena Mintah Akandoh, who addressed the media argued to replace trained and licensed professionals with SHS graduates for cheap political returns will worsen an already precarious situation.
“General practitioners, specialists and consultants have all joined a long line of Ghanaian health professionals waiting for clearance or job offers from abroad in order to leave this country.”
“The situation has become critical to the point that Ghana is currently experiencing losses of general practitioners and specialists needed to handle cases across the healthcare continuum.”
“Under these prevailing conditions, one would expect government will ramp up its uptake of trained and licensed nurses, doctors, physician assistants, pharmacists, laboratory technicians and other health professionals in order to mitigate the impact of the dwindling numbers of these professionals on the Ghanaian public.’
“Unfortunately, our checks rather reveal a dangerous attempt to replace trained and licensed professionals with unemployed SHS graduates for cheap political returns that will make an already precarious situation even worse.
“If a country working within the limits of scarce resources, has in excess of 19,000 diploma nurses, 10,729 degree nurses and 1,000 trained doctors who have completed their housemanship sitting at home, what logical reasoning warrants the intake of untrained and unlicensed SHS leavers into our healthcare system,” he asked?
Mr. Akandoh condemned comparisons with past occurrences when SHS leavers were employed to assist trained staff in mundane duties and argued these happened because there were then fewer health professionals.
The situation today, he said, is different because there are trained and licensed professionals idling at home who should rather be recruited to perform these duties.
“This new government initiative amounts to misplaced priority and as a country, we cannot afford to abandon our investments in human capital like the many abandoned government projects littered across the country.”
“It is therefore in the interest of government and all its agents and assigns to do all they can to avoid causing financial loss to the state,” he warned.
The Minority charged the government to urgently prioritise the employment of trained, qualified and licensed healthcare professionals before resorting to recruiting other groups into the healthcare delivery system.
This, the Caucus said, is prudent and necessary considering the current high attrition rate within the public sector if the object of protection of the public purse is to remain paramount.
