‘Check proliferation of nurses, midwifery schools’
The Ashanti Regional Director of Ghana Health Services (GHS), Dr Alexis Nang-Beifubah, has called for measures to check the proliferation of nurses and midwifery training institutions in the country.
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He said the mushrooming of such institutions was creating integrity problems for the nursing and midwifery professions and, therefore, stressed the need for the Ghana College of Nurses and Midwives (GCNM) to collaborate with the Ministry of Health (MoH) and the GHS to arrest the disturbing development.
Dr Nang-Beifubah made the call at the closing ceremony of a 10-day Basic Emergency Obstetrics and Newborn Care (BEmONC) skills update for midwifery tutors and preceptors of health training institutions in Ghana.
Dr Nang-Beifubah expressed gratitude to the GCNM for coming up with training modules which, he said, would go a long way to improve the quality and skills of the practitioners and make them more relevant to the profession.
Professionalism
The regional director asked the nurses and midwives to exhibit professionalism in their work as they played a very important role in healthcare delivery.
He said, “Knowledge, skills and competence alone do not translate into professionalism unless they ride at the back of attitude and character.”
Career progression
Dr Nang-Beifubah bemoaned the practice where some nurses and midwives left the wards and went back to the university to upgrade themselves in order to progress in their career.
He said it should be possible for those already on the field to do short and specialised courses designed by the college for the nurses and midwives to upgrade themselves and move up the ladder without necessarily having to leave the ward.
Using the medical profession as an example, he said most doctors, after qualifying did not go back to the university for further studies in order to progress in the profession.
Instead, they did specialised courses in their chosen fields, he said, and expressed the hope that this could be done for the nurses and midwives as well.
Midwives
For her part, the Director of the College, Dr Jemima Dennis Antwi, explained that the training was aimed at giving the midwifery tutors the requisite skills, training and resources to impart knowledge to their students.
She stressed the important role played by midwives in health delivery worldwide, particularly in the improvement of the maternal, newborn and child health (MNCH).
She advised the participants to let the training and skills acquired reflect in their output since “at the end of the day, what really counts and what the public will measure us by is how much our professions have helped others and not how much we have helped ourselves”.
In all, 17 participants, drawn from the nurses and midwifery training institutions, took part in the training and according to Dr Antwi,
“We intend to organise more of these tailor-made updates from October onwards to reach the wider population of midwives.”
