The Minority in Parliament is demanding the government reverse a policy directive introduced in nursing training colleges that demands 30% of admissions to be reserved for the Ministry of Health.
According to the caucus, in addition to this manipulative policy, heads of these institutions have been ordered to suspend all admissions indefinitely.
The Minority warned these directives are a recipe for more corruption that characterized all admissions into government institutions including the police and military recruitment and teacher training schools.
Ranking Member of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Health, Kwabena Mintah Akando, addressed the media on Monday and stressed the situation cannot be allowed to continue.
“Per official communications from the Ministry of Health to nursing training colleges, colleges are now restricted to admit not more than 50% of their capacities. Underlying this restrictive admission directive is government’s inability to back its manifesto promise with the financial commitment required.”
“These restrictions on intake into Nursing training colleges smacks of policy incoherence and pure insensitivity. How can government claim to be improving access to nursing training by giving trainee allowances and on the other hand institute restrictive quotas to reduce same admissions by over 50%?”
“Again, is it not insensitive to implement a Free SHS policy that is expected to increase SHS graduates and then restrict access to tertiary education in nursing training colleges?”
The Ranking member noted that first-year students of nursing colleges are yet to receive their trainee allowance, which exposes the duplicity and dishonesty behind the government’s noisemaking and propaganda.
He argued that though government’s admission quotas in the various nursing training schools are not new to the Akufo-Addo government, the new directives from the Ministry of Health if left unchecked will be disastrous considering the current high attrition among health personnel.
According to him, 3000 nurses and midwives left the country in June 2022 in search of greener pastures abroad and questioned whether with this high attrition it makes sense for the government to maintain bottlenecks to nursing training in order to claim to be fulfilling a pledge.
Mr. Akandoh also expressed concern at what he says is an encroachment of the Health Ministry into Internally Generated Funds (IGF) of Health Training Institutions including Nursing Training Colleges.
The 2022 budget allows the colleges to retain 100% of the IGF for their operations, however, the Ranking indicated the Ministry of Health has devised several mechanisms by which it collects all monies from the sale of forms, and takes a good percentage of the IGF for interviews and organizes regular programmes requiring training colleges to fund.
“A typical example was a programme organized by the Ministry of Health last week on the Preparation of Quarterly Financial Reports for covered entities at the Splendor Hotel in Kumasi. Prior to the start of this programme, participants were required to pay GH¢2,400 in advance for their own accommodation and feeding at this event.”
According to him, these plans have exacerbated the already precarious situation of inadequate subventions from the central government for managing these colleges.
He called on the government to address the self-imposed bottlenecks on admissions into nursing training colleges so they can run at full capacity and also stop the Health Ministry from encroaching into the IGF of Colleges of Health and allow them to use their funds as directed by the 2022 Budget Appropriations Act.