The President of the Ghanaian-Diaspora Nurses Alliance (G-DNA), Prof.Yvonne Commodore Mensah has called for the training of specialized nurses in order to boost healthcare needs of the citizens and also advance the profession in the country.

Available data shows the nurse-patient ratio currently in Ghana is 1:18, which means that at any point in time, one nurse is attending to approximately 18 patients.

This statistic presents the need for the training of more nurses especially in diversed fields, it is to this end that the Ghanaian-Diaspora Nurses Alliance(G-DNA), a non-profit organization looking to advance the course of nursing in the country has been launched.

Speaking to journalists at the launch of G-DNA at the University of Ghana, Legon in Accra last Friday, Prof. Commodore Mensah said “we hope to connect all Ghanaian nurses wherever they are -nurses who have Ghana in their DNA to come back home to advance nursing and healthcare in Ghana.

In Ghana we have made a lot of progress in training more nurses but the progress that we have made in training basic nurses has not translated in progress in training specialty nurses, so we need nurses who are trained in diversed specialty areas such as cardiology, diabetes, infectious diseases, cancer and we need this specialized training to meet the healthcare needs of Ghanaians, so we know that a lot of chronic conditions are now more common such as hypertension, kidney disease, diabetes so we need to make sure that the nurses that we have in Ghana have the adequate level of specialization and training to be able to care for these patients.”

Opportunities

Further she indicated that the initiative has some prospects for nursing in the country, she said “At this stage we are at the process of listening and learning and understanding the unique challenges nurses in Ghana face and that is why we have breakout groups as part of the launch today -to hear from the nurses and we will take this information and analyse some of the feedback we have received to use this information to design programmes, webinars, conferences, seminars and some of those things will be offered in person, virtual so if there are nurses in the diaspora who have training in different areas they can still contribute to this mission and help to teach their fellow Ghanaian nurses in these different areas as well.”

Beefing up professional nurses

The Director General of Ghana Health Service, Dr. Patrick Kuma Aboagye conceded that there was the need to beef up the number of professional nurses in the country.

“Nurses leaving the country to Europe and other parts of the world, they are taking mainly the professional nurses and so there is the need for us to beef up the number of professional nurses, so what we are doing is first to ensure that we expand the study leave for the auxiliary nurses so that in the next two to three years they can become professional nurses and also beef up the quality of nursing and healthcare in the country.

We have also established a system where we are looking around to do an assessment to see the real impact -what has been the real numbers that have left, we are also ensuring that for those who have gone to study and have certificates and are professional nurses, we assess and upgrade them, so we can balance of the proportion of auxiliary – professional nurses; because we need more professional nurses to ensure that services are done well.”

Prof.Lydia Aziato, Vice Chancellor of the University of Health and Allied Sciences who was the keynote speaker at the event stated that there are limited opportunities for specialized training, funding for education and other capacity-building opportunities for nurses and midwives in Ghana, which compound their service delivery.

“Although we have made significant strides in increasing the number of schools of nursing and midwifery both in public and private institutions in the last decade, more work is still needed especially in the area of specialization.”

The G-DNA is global intervention to advance healthcare delivery by encouraging Ghanaian nurses abroad to contribute to advance nursing and midwifery education and practice in Ghana.