The Minority Spokesperson on Health, Kwabena Mintah Akandoh has questioned the rationale behind recruiting senior high school graduates to assist with health care delivery at CHPS compounds in rural areas while there is a backlog of unemployed graduate nurses nationwide.
“In this same country, we are debating over this issue that there are a number of nurses who haven’t been posted. Why then will we go for unprofessionals to do the same job?”
He clarified that he is not against the creation of job opportunities for the youth, only that he thinks government should set its priorities right.
“Most of these duties can be performed by community health nurses, why then do we leave them unemployed and go for others?”
He further downplayed government’s argument that there is a deficit in the health sector.
He believes there could have been better ways of addressing the situation than going in for unprofessionals.
“If there is a deficit of about 5,000, we have about 3,000 unemployed. Why couldn’t we have employed the 3,000 and find ways of further filling the deficit.”
“If you are in government you must be humble enough to listen. We all have a stake in the development of this country,” he added.
The YEA has announced that 5,000 senior high school graduates will at the end of this month be employed to assist with basic health care delivery, such as recording medical history of patients at CHPS compounds located in rural communities.
The Ghana Registered Nurses and Midwives Association described the move as disturbing and opposed the idea, as it maintains that only skilled professionals should be engaged.
The Director-General of the Ghana Health Service, Dr. Patrick Kuma-Aboagye, in reaction to this, said the system has been in place since 2016 and is geared toward community engagement, not clinical work.
Meanwhile, members of the 2019 batch of Nurse Assistant Preventive (NAP) and Nurse Assistant Clinical (NAC) have complained of government’s failure to post them.
According to them, although they have been registered on the Ministry of Health’s recruitment portal and made several follow-ups to draw the attention of the government to their plights, it has fallen on deaf ears.
