Part of your salary will be kept in Ghana – Govt to ‘Barbados nurses’
It has emerged that Ghana’s nurses expected to be exported to Barbados will not be permanently engaged on the Caribbean Island.
Minister of Health, Kwaku Agyeman Manu, made known while shedding more light on Ghana’s memorandum of understanding with Barbados to export nurses to that country.
Addressing trainee nurses at the Kumasi Nursing and Midwifery Training College, the minister indicated that experienced nurses will be sent on temporal rotation periods with an amount of their salaries to be retained in Ghana.
He explained, “we will be rotating. Some will go and come back. And we want those with some level of experience because if you just finish school and we let you go there as an intern, you will go and disgrace us and they will not take us again.”
On the salary retention element, the minister noted, “We need to facilitate you such that you will bring money back home to support the Ghanaian economy. We wouldn’t take your money but we are looking at a situation where you all have accounts with Bank of Ghana so some little part of your money will be saved here so that Ghana will have some dollars to support the system.”
The visit to the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital formed part of the 4-day visit of the Health Minister to health facilities in the Ashanti Region.
He was flanked by a high-powered delegation including the Chief Executive Officer of KATH, Dr. Oheneba Danso and the Ashanti Regional Director of Health, Dr. Emmanuel Tinkorang.
The tour around the tertiary referral facility afforded the ministry the opportunity to appraise itself of new projects; interact with staff of the hospital and learn challenges confronting its full delivery of healthcare to the public.
The minister inspected the new oncology expansion project, which forms part of the National Nuclear Medicine and Radiotherapy project
Management of KATH relayed the need for some extra equipment to commission two critical installations; the SPECT CT and the LINAC, which are expected to modernize cancer treatment services in the country.
Mr. Agyeman Manu made a whistle stop at the ten-year-old accident and emergency centre, which currently needs immediate retooling to serve its purpose.
Other units where the minister took interest in were the newly installed 5.4 million dollar oxygen plant installed by the hospital with its internally generated funds and the psychiatric unit, which is facing serious challenges of space.