A former Minister of Health, Mr Algban Sumani Bagbin, has said that the health sector should not be used as an avenue for job creation.
According to Mr Bagbin, to work as a health professional, “you need to have the heart for the work”.
Mr Bagbin, who said it would be suicidal to put people in the sector because they needed jobs, was speaking at a workshop in Accra organised by the Ministry of Health on the proposed setting up of an agency to manage all health training institutions in the country.
Participants in the workshop were expected to come out with modalities for the establishment of the agency and how they were to function. A bill to support the establishment of the agency is expected to be passed by the end of 2014.
The workshop brought together former ministers of health, past and present chief directors at the MoH, agencies of the MoH, directors at the Ghana Health Service (GHS), development partners in the health sector, collaborating ministries, administrators and human resource managers of health facilities among others.
Mr Bagbin stressed the need to get people with the right attitude to work in the health sector since the work required a lot of dedication and commitment.
To him, there was a current high attrition rate in the health sector due to the enormity of their work adding that, “you work yourself to death” and called on people to be more responsible to their health so as to help ease the burden on the health personnel.
Another former Minister of Health, Mr George Sipa Yankey, commended the MoH for the move to establish an agency to manage all health institutions in the country and added that as the world had become a global village, it was imperative for the health sector of the country to be put on an international pedestal.
He expressed the hope that the establishment of an agency would help in elevating the various training institutions into universities to help in the production of quality personnel for the health sector.
Why the agency?
The Minister of Health, Ms Sherry Ayittey, in an address said as part of its mandate to produce quality medical personnel, the ministry had proposed the establishment of the Health Training Institutions Agency.
The agency, she said, would be responsible for the coordination and administration of all the 75 public health training institutions and 35 private health training institutions in the country.
She said the establishment of the agency had become imperative and very crucial due to the complexity of training quality health professionals coupled with the high numbers of health training institutions currently in the country.
The Director General of the Ghana Health Service, Dr Ebenezer Appiah Denkyirah, who chaired the programme, said the establishment of the agency would help to coordinate the training of quality health professionals in the country.
He said it would also help in addressing the issue of shortage of health personnel, especially in remote areas where their services were needed most.
Some collaborators in the health sector, including the Ghana Education Service and the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development, pledged their commitment to ensure that the establishment of an agency to regulate the activities of the various institutions across the country became successful.
By Rebecca Quaicoe-Duho/Daily Graphic/Ghana
Source: Daily Graphic
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