Students with Medical and Dental Degree Certificates issued by Medical and Dental Schools from Ukraine in 2022 will not be recognised forthwith by the Medical and Dental Council, (MDC) Ghana until normal academic activities resume.
A statement issued yesterday and signed by the Registrar of MDC, Dr Divine N. Banyubala, said the council’s attention has been drawn to information that some students were undergoing online medical and dental training being organised by schools in Ukraine, China and some other countries.
A statement copied to the Ghanaian Times said students who were currently studying medicine or dentistry in Ukraine and have not taken advantage of the one-off opportunity to continue their training here in Ghana or seek transfer to other accredited medical or dental schools in other countries for the completion of their programmes should have themselves to blame.
“For the avoidance of doubt, the council categorically states that online Medical or Dental training done in any part of the world is short of acceptable professional training standards and is not recognised by the Medical and Dental Council, Ghana,” he said.
Earlier this year, the MDC observed that the quality of some of the doctors trained outside the country left much to be desired.
“Now, generally we have had problems relative to the quality of training of foreign doctors and dentists in most of these jurisdictions especially trainees from Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, and China.
These quality concerns are generating a lot of anxiety and disquiet among the professional fraternity,” the statement said.
It said the training of doctors in some foreign countries and the activities of quack or unregistered doctors whose actions were putting the lives of many unsuspecting members of the public in grave danger needed to be looked at.
The statement explained that the major causes of the failure were that some of the candidates had poor knowledge in the various disciplines in medicine, including poor knowledge in basic sciences and basic clinical skills, a claim which was corroborated by various examiner’s reports.
“Because of low standards of teaching in some of these foreign medical schools, these students come and fail over several attempts. As we speak some have even written more than ten times and still failed, so the last Board took a decision in consonance with best practice to limit the number of times a candidate can write to five attempts,” he said.
Dr Banyubala noted that, some of the foreign medical schools admitted students with poor West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) results and others who studied General Arts, Visual Arts, Agricultural Sciences, Technical and Vocational Skills (Carpentry, Building Construction), among others.
According to the statement, some of the WASSCE results slips used to secure the admissions were Ds, Es, and Fs grades that are inadmissible for general university programmes in Ghana, “to talk less of medicine.”
The statement added that these poor training standards were not limited to Ghana, adding that members of the Association of Medical Councils of Africa (AMCOA) share the same frustrations and concerns.
