500-Bed hostel for SDA nursing college inaugurated
The Deputy Minister of Health, Mrs Tina Gifty Naa Ayele Mensah, has commissioned a 500-bed hostel facility for the Seventh-Day Adventist Nursing and Midwifery Training College at its Barekese campus in the Atwima Nwabiagya North District in the Ashanti Region.
The contract sum was GH¢ 6,092,480.04 fully funded by the college from its internally generated funds with support from the SDA church.
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The facility is to help the college absorb more students and thereby, reduce unemployment in the country as well as relocate more of its students from the main campus at Kwadaso.
The long-term plan, however, is to make the Kwadaso campus a training centre for specialised nurses in the areas of critical care, peri-operative, emergency, public health and geriatric nursing among others.
The college, established in 2005, was given the land at Barekese by the late chief of the area, Nana Kwame Awuah, and development started in 2013.
The construction of the hostel was started in November 2020 and completed in November 2021.
Inauguration
Mrs Mensah said the ministry was working assiduously to ensure that a quality human resource base was available to achieve the vision of a healthy population for national development.
"Nurses and midwives play an integral part in the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goal three through universal health coverage", she said.
Speaking on the theme: "Building excellence in nursing and midwifery education to achieve universal health coverage: the role of stakeholders in infrastructure development", Mrs Mensah said the government was working tirelessly to ensure quality training, equitable distribution of a competent health workforce and improvement in health infrastructure.
Appeal
The principal of the college, Mr Daniel Attah-Tuffour, appealed to the government to help develop the remaining 50 per cent of undeveloped land to provide more infrastructure for students.
"The college needs more lecture halls and hostels for the male students. The college would be grateful if the uncompleted three-storey hostel for male students is completed for the college", he said.
Mr Attah-Tuffour on behalf of all health training institutions appealed that they be rolled onto the GETfund to be able to benefit from projects.
He assured the government that the institute will train more nurses to fill vacancies in its Agenda 111 health facilities.
Church-state partnership
The Executive Director of the Christian Health Association of Ghana (CHAG), Dr Peter Yeboah, said the ceremony affirmed the timeless church-state partnership in health delivery.
He said CHAG was improving access to quality healthcare services for all people living in Ghana and producing critical human resources for health for the Ghanaian health sector.
Dr Yeboah called on stakeholders including churches and communities to re-examine their responsibilities in building the necessary health infrastructure to train human resource for health development in the interest of national health security.