The General Secretary of the Ghana Registered Nurses and Midwives Association (GRNMA), David Tenkorang, has said that the ongoing brain drain involving health workers is likely to affect the Agenda 111 project to build hospitals across the country.
He said all the hospitals under the project, when completed, would need to be filled with nurses, midwives, doctors, and other health workers.
The hospitals cannot function if these health professions are not available, he said.
He was commenting on the red listing of Ghana by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the United Kingdom (UK).
Ghana was included on a list of 54 countries that should not be targeted for recruitment by health and social care employers in the UK due to a UHC Service Coverage Index lower than 50 and a density of doctors, nurses, and midwives below the global median.
Mr Tenkorang told Martin Asiedu Darteh on the mid-day news on TV3 Wednesday, April 12 that “It is quite a disturbing issue because it is going to negatively impact the healthcare delivery in Ghana.
“The government has set out to build agenda 111 and all these hospitals will have to be populated by nurses and midwives, if we don’t take in drastic actions to stop the situation it will certainly adversely impact on healthcare delivery.”
He added “As far as 2020, we saw this coming even before Covid reared its ugly head because some of the Scandinavian and European countries have had their nurses move out of UK and therefore we have a certain kind of attrition. The salaries of midwives and nurses in Ghana is nothing to write home about.”
By Laud Nartey|3news.com|Ghana