Unemployed private nurses to demonstrate
More than 2,000 privately trained nurses have threatened to take to the streets in protest against the government’s failure to facilitate their employment.
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The aggrieved nurses said although the national posting forms were opened to all publicly and privately trained nurses who sat the national licensing examination under the auspices of the Ministry of Health (MoH), for more than three years now no single privately trained nurse had been absorbed into the public sector.
The nurses are members of the Coalition of Unemployed Privately Trained Nurses and the Ghana Association of Health Training Institutions.
At a press conference in Accra last Wednesday to register their frustration, the Spokesperson for the coalition, Ms Beatrice Adjei Peprah, said pages 33 and 34 and Chapter Seven of the application brochure and forms from the MoH stated the number of accredited private health institutions which offered training in various fields of health care and that the ministry should employ those graduates on completion of their respective courses.
Predicament
She said the predicament of privately trained nurses had been worsened by the refusal of teaching hospitals and the Christian Health Association of Ghana (CHAG) to employ them.
That, she claimed, was due to the fact that the Ministry of Finance had “refused to give members of the coalition financial clearance, even though it is a national requirement to gain employment as privately trained nurses”.
“We do not understand what is going on because we are aware that most of the private nursing training institutions where we were trained were given professional accreditation by the government and are recognised and regulated by the MoH,” she indicated.
Ms Peprah expressed the belief that the public nursing training institutions alone could not train the desired number of nurses required in the country, hence the support from the private nursing training institutions, and wondered why their products were discriminated against.
She added that the coalition could not comprehend why the government would deny privately trained nurses jobs, explaining that it was no fault of theirs that the public health institutions could not absorb all of them, for which reason they had to resort to the private institutions.
Ms Peprah served notice of their intention to hit the streets in protest against their predicament if their concerns were not given the needed attention in the earliest possible time.
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