Nurses with advanced certificates to be promoted to make up for Europe migration - GHS

The Director General of the Ghana Health Service, Dr. Patrick Kuma-Aboagye, has bemoaned the large brain drain of professional nurses in the country to other advanced countries in Europe and others.

He said that the situation has forced the Service to devise urgent measures to ensure that it augments the numbers and ensure that the country is not fully deprived when it comes to the roles that these professional nurses play in the healthcare sector.

“We are having a lot of nurses leaving this country to Europe and other parts of the world. They are taking mainly the professional nurses and so there’s the need for us to beef up the number of professional nurses. So, when we are doing is that first, we expand the study leave for the auxiliary nurses, so that the next two to three years, they can also actually become professional nurses, to beef up the quality of nursing care in the country,” he said.

Dr. Patrick Kuma-Aboagye added that the GHS is also working alongside other institutions to be able to put together the exact data on the impact of these migrations by the nurses.

He also stated that they are ensuring that all nurses who have legally acquired certificates in advanced studies are assessed and properly promoted so as to help with the situation.

“We have also established a system where we are actually looking round to do an assessment to see the real impact and the real numbers that have left. We are also ensuring that those who have gone to study and have certificates as professional nurses are assessed and upgraded so that we can balance off the proportion of auxiliary nurses and professional nurses, because we need more professional nurses to ensure that services are done well,” he added.

Responding to a question about the suggestion for nursing institutions in the country to be upgraded so that they can begin to award degrees to their students, the DG of the Ghana Health Service said that while this is a right call, there is the need to acknowledge that there is the need for auxiliary nurses in other levels of healthcare provision in the country.

“We also need auxiliary nurses in certain levels of care. The issue is the balance. We know that we need more professional nurses so we are scaling up the numbers,” he said.

Dr. Patrick Kuma-Aboagye was speaking during the launch of the Ghanaian-Diaspora Nursing Alliance, in Accra.

The Alliance, which has the backing of the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC), the Ghana College of Nurses and Midwives (GCNM), the Ghana Registered Nurses and Midwives Association (GRNMA), and the Ghana Health Service (GHS), aims at bridging the gap in nursing between the nurses in Ghana and their counterparts in the diaspora.

The initiative is led by an Assistant Professor at the Johns Hopkins Schools of Nursing and Public Health in Baltimore, Prof. Yvonne Commodore-Mensah.

The mission of the Ghanaian-Diaspora Nursing Alliance is to create local-to-global collaboration between nurses in Ghana and their counterparts in the diaspora.

AE/MA