University Nursing Students Association to hold protest march
Members of the University Nursing Students Association of Ghana (UNSAG) will stage a demonstration on December 2, 2016 over what they term the insensitivity of the government to their plight.
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Apart from the issue of unemployment, the students claim that their laboratories and demonstration rooms lack the requisite logistics to facilitate teaching and learning.
At a news conference in Accra yesterday, the President of the UNSAG, Mr Collins Agyarko, said the demonstration was to draw the attention of the government to the plight of graduate nurses.
He said members of the Registered Graduate Nurses Association in Accra and the National Health Students Association of Ghana would join in the demonstration.
Unemployment
Mr Agyarko said more than 2000 graduate nurses and midwives had not been recruited in the past five years.
“As of September 2016, the government had not employed any graduate nurse, but had only released financial clearance expressing interest in employing 732 nursing officers out of the over 2000 graduate nurses”, he said.
Mr Agyarko described the release of the financial clearance as a way of scoring cheap political points.
Other challenges
Mr Agyarko also asked the government to reintroduce the allocation of Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFund) buses to all institutions to facilitate the transportation of students to their training facilities.
He further called for the termination of the payment of fees by students to hospitals and clinics for their internship.
“We are calling on the government to better resource our hospitals with the necessary working logistics and tools for healthcare delivery so that these hospitals will stop charging us fees,” he stressed.
Training
Mr Agyarko noted that while healthcare delivery across the globe was shifting towards technological inventions, healthcare training and education in Ghana was still manual based.
“These students only get to see these machines in the big teaching hospitals, becoming clueless at operating them,” he said.
To reverse the situation, Mr Agyarko called on the government to resource the various nurses labs or skills rooms with the necessary modern healthcare equipment.
He called for an end to what he said was the politicisation of nursing and midwifery education in the country.