According to David Tenkorang, general secretary of the Ghana Registered Nurses and Midwives Association (GRNMA), the senior health professionals leaving to other countries are the experienced and competent ones.
He said if this situation is not attended to immediately, it will have a dire impact on healthcare delivery in Ghana.
Mr Tenkorang identified what is causing the brain drain among health workers after indicating that the salaries of nurses and midwives are not the best.
Also, he said, the general condition of service for health workers is poor.
He was commenting on the red listing of Ghana by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the United Kingdom (UK).
Ghana was included on a list of 54 countries that should not be targeted for recruitment by health and social care employers in the UK due to a UHC Service Coverage Index lower than 50 and a density of doctors, nurses, and midwives below the global median.
Mr Tenkorang told Martin Asiedu Darteh on the Midday Live on TV3 Wednesday, April 12 that “it is quite a disturbing issue because it is going to negatively impact the healthcare delivery in Ghana.
“The government has set out to build Agenda 111 and all these hospitals will have to be populated by nurses and midwives. If we don’t take in drastic actions to stop the situation, it will certainly adversely impact healthcare delivery.”
He added: “As far as 2020, we saw this coming even before Covid reared its ugly head because some of the Scandinavian and European countries have had their nurses move out of UK and therefore we have a certain kind of attrition. The salaries of midwives and nurses in Ghana is nothing to write home about.”
“We need our skilled manpower to take care of the good people of this country. Those who are leaving are not the ones who just completed school, they are the experienced ones, those who have ten years to go on retirement, those who have fifteen years.
“So there is going to be a vacuum because these are the very experienced, competent nurses and midwives who should mentor the newly recruited. If we allow them to leave the way they are leaving, then we will have problems.”