Over 3000 nurses have left Ghana since 2020 for greener pastures – GHS

The Ghana Health Service has revealed that a total of 3,688 health personnel in the country migrated abroad to pursue better opportunities within the last three years.

According to GHS, the migrated persons include professionals and critical caregivers working in state and mission health facilities.

It will be recalled that Howard Catton, the Head of the International Council of Nurses (ICN) in the UK in an interview with BBC in 2023 affirmed 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 alone.

The health professionals leaving the country have cited poor working conditions as the reason for vacating their positions to seek greener pastures abroad.

The Ghana Health Service, as part of efforts to address the worrying concern, said it revised and doubled study leave for unprofessional nurses as far back as 2021 and anticipates that by the middle of next year, most of these unprofessional nurses that took advantage would have qualified to fill the gap created.

However, the Majority Leader in Parliament, Osei Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu, while debating on the Health Ministry’s 2024 budget, said the government must consider an increment in remuneration to deal with the trend.

“Mr. Speaker, I think that we should look at the remuneration [of nurses]. If we look at the compensation, it was over and above what was allocated and if people have left, the compensation should then climb up. We should do a proper audit of the nurses who have left to know the deficit and should be able to employ to replace those who have exited”.

The Minister of Health, Kwaku Agyemang-Manu had also reiterated that although the phenomenon of health workers’ migration is a global occurrence, the MoH is working closely with the Ministry of Employment and Labour Relations to streamline the migration policy to address current and future emerging issues.