The government has engaged the services of 58 veterinary professionals, including 41 doctors, to augment the dwindling number of veterinary officers in the country.
The rest are veterinary nurses who will help protect public health and control animal diseases transferable to human beings.
“The development is crucial because in the next two to five year’s nearly all the present staff of the Veterinary Services Department (VSD) will retire,” the Chief Veterinary Officer, Dr Asiedu Baah, has said.
He spoke in an interview with the Daily Graphic last week Wednesday at a training programme for the new recruits in Accra.
Up until the new recruits were engaged, he said, the VSD had a staff strength of 55 professionals of which 45 were in active service with the rest being staff on retirement who had been re-engaged to manage the department’s 216 district directorates.
“The recruitment exercise is very important as it brings to 113 the number of veterinary professionals we have in the country. Although the number is still small compared to the number of district directorates we operate, it is better than last year,” he said.
Dr Baah said the new recruits had already been posted to the various regions and districts where the Rearing for Food and Jobs (RFJ) programme was being implemented.
He explained that the professionals recruited were among a batch that had graduated since 2016 but had remained unemployed due to the government’s inability to absorb them into the system.
He said improving the staff strength of the VSD was among promises the government made when it took office in 2017.
“The development is very important as it will contribute positively to the Rearing for Food and Jobs programme which was launched in June this year.
Consequently, we have posted the recruits to the areas where their services are needed,” he said.
Training programme
The three-day intensive training programme on the services’s standard operating procedures was part of measures to improve on the knowledge of the new veterinary professionals.
The VSD training was done with support from the Ghana Poultry Project and is part of a five-year project sponsored by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
A Deputy Director of VSD, Dr William Adu, said the training focused on surveillance systems, laboratory processes, treatment protocols and administrative procedures directed at sharing with the new staff experience and knowledge.
According to him, the training was crucial to help the new recruits to learn from the old hands majority of whom were due for retirement in five years.
“Unlike us who had the opportunity to learn from our seniors, these new recruits will unfortunately not benefit from the experience of their seniors because most of us will be due for retirement in the next five years.
“And so providing training opportunities such as this is very important for them,” he said.
Dr Adu added that the department would also introduce a mentorship programme to support the new recruits to learn fast.
Optimism
The Chief of Party of the GPP, Ms Carianne de Boer, said her office was optimistic that the training programme would help the new recruits to provide essential animal health services to enhance the quality of livestock and poultry.
She said the GPP was determined to increase competitiveness in the domestic production and processing of poultry meat and eggs in the country, but she added, “This comes with a lot of health issues that need to be addressed and hence the training programme.”
The development is crucial because in the next two to five years, the Veterinary Services Department (VSD) will lose almost 100 per cent of its staff to retirement.