The Member of Parliament for Assin South Constituency in the Central Region, John Ntim Fordjour, has called on the Ministry of Health (MoH) to explore the avenue of exporting health personnel to generate revenue for the nation instead of cutting down on training of these professionals.

The health ministry has instructed principals of nursing training institutions to reduce the number of students they admit for the 2017/18 academic year by 40 per cent or more. But the New Patriotic Party (NPP) MP said “We have to make arrangements for the excesses and the surplus to be useful”.

Mr. Fordjour argued, “we still have some shortfalls in patience to nurse ratio and the best thing to do is to resource the sector to have adequate personnel trained”.
He said “it is not just the numbers that we want to push into the system but the quality is important. We must come out with quotas that will commensurate with various sectors”.
“If this regulations have been accepted, we need to further look at other options because it is very easy to set up a facility or institutions to train students in humanities is the time Ministry of Education and the Ghana Education Service come in toso it give incentives to those who would be trained in the technical institutions so that we will have more trainees in the technical sector”, the MP added.

The Director of Communications for the Convention People’s Party (CPP), Kadril Abdul Rauf Issifu, said Ghana need more nurses therefore cutting down on admission will “worry” the nation. “If we are to take a cue from Cuba, today they export nurses and doctors.

We could train every kind of professionals in this country and export them to other countries to make money on them”, he explained.

He said “the level of thinking of our policy makers is narrow because we have to come out with policy that will make it possible to export our nurses”. Ghanaian nurses can be sent to countries like Guinea Bissau who need nurses, he said, adding that even their services are needed in rural Ghana.

A member of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), Abraham Amaliba suspects that government is hiding something from Ghanaians.

“They want to reduce the intake but ask yourself, if all our hospitals have nurses that when you go to the hospital we will not see patience in need of nurses?
That is where they are not being candid”. Lawyer Amaliba argued, “has the ministry bridged the gap and now they are telling us that we have excess? When communities are crying for nurses? When chip compounds are crying for nurses? Then government appointees are telling us they have enough”.
The NDC man said “the NPP did not know they were going to win the election. They have won and now they don’t know how to pay the nurses that is why they are cutting them. They have realized that it is not possible to pay their allowances because day in and day out, this government keeps changing the goal post”.