The President of the Ghana College of Nurses and Midwives (GCNW), Professor Victoria Bam, has called on the government to implement sustainable measures in addressing challenges facing health workers to prevent them from fleeing to seek better services in America and Europe.
She said although migration of health workers, including nurses and doctors, was not a new phenomenal, as experienced in the 90s, the current situation was becoming alarming, and needed an immediate solution.
“Last year we had more than 6,000 nurses who migrated from the country, this year alone it is estimated that about 4,000 of them have also left.
There are many nurses and midwives who have also graduated and sitting at home, so we want to appeal to the government to recruit them to fill in the vacancies of those who have migrated so they do not also leave,” she said.
Professor Bam said this yesterday at the 8th Annual General Meeting and 4th Scientific Conference in Accra on the theme “A decade of nursing and midwifery specialist education in Ghana: innovation and high impact intervention towards universal health coverage”.
She said the government through the Ministry of Health should improve the conditions of services, which includes but not limited to salaries, support educational needs of families of health workers, provide better resources in the country’s health facilities, among others.
“There are inadequate resources in the health facilities to work with, in recent times there are issues of kidney diseases, which the country lack the facilities in treating such diseases.
So what we are asking the government is that aside increasing the salaries, we are also expecting them to resource heath facilities with material resources, provide the needed equipment for treatments, and as well provide the human resources,” Professor Bam said.
She explained that it gets very frustrating when nurses go on duties without having access to basic equipment and materials to save lives.
The Rector of the GCNM, Mrs Hannah Akua Oparebea Acquah, said it was worrying when specialised nurses after receiving quality training leave the country to seek greener pastures somewhere.
She also attributed the situation to the lack of condition of services, and also appealed to the government to invest in the training of specialised nurses, and support the health institutions with funds to help improve the quality of training of nurses and doctors.
BY BERNARD BENGHAN
