A/R: Over 300 Nurses Abandon Ghana For Greener Pastures In 1st Quarter This Year
Over 300 health workers in the Ashanti Region abandoned Ghana Health Service(GHS) to pursue better opportunities abroad in the first quarter of 2023.
Authorities of the various health facilities in the Region are calling on the government to find a lasting solution to curb the situation since it’s negatively impacting healthcare delivery in the region.
Dr. Emmanuel Tinkorang, the Ashanti Regional Director of the Ghana Health Service bemoaning the issue said their data currently shows that 304 health workers, including doctors and nurses, have applied for leave without salaries.
Further investigations conducted by the directorate indicate that the majority of these workers have already traveled overseas in search of better job opportunities to improve their living conditions.
Dr. Emmanuel Tinkorang, in an interview regarding the negative impact of nurses quitting their jobs to further overseas, said, “When we did the analysis for the first quarter of 2023, we realized that about 304 applied for leave without pay which means that they have left the service, but additional information indicates that most of them have left the country and these are very skillful health workers with the right knowledge, attitude, and skill to do the job, but it seems that they have been attracted outside the country”.
“This is worrying in the sense that these are workers that we need to run the health system in the country and the government is doing well by providing health infrastructure and if our people are leaving the country, how do we run this system?”, he added.
The past few years have witnessed a mass exodus of Ghanaian nurses to Europe and North America owing to their poor conditions of service, the key among them is poor remuneration in the country.
The mad rush for overseas jobs began in 2022 when inflation and a raft of taxes were imposed on workers.
Howard Catton, the head of the International Council of Nurses (ICN) in the UK in an interview with BBC recently also asserted that many specialist nurses have left the West African country for better-paid jobs overseas with over 1,200 Ghanaian nurses joining the UK’s nursing register in 2022.