Private training schools blamed for growing unemployment among health professionals – Ministry

The Ministry of Health has blamed private health training institutions for the rising number of unemployed health professionals in the country, accusing them of admitting more students than the public system can absorb.

In an interview on Citi FM on Thursday, 29 May 2025, the Ministry’s spokesperson, Mr Tony Goodman, said some private institutions continue to operate outside the Ministry’s approved training quotas, producing large numbers of graduates without any assurance of public sector employment.

“These schools often exceed the numbers we plan for, and later expect the Ministry to employ all their graduates,” Mr Goodman said.

“We train based on national and regional needs, but private institutions tend to admit based on their own interests, and that creates pressure on the system.”

Mr Goodman explained that the Ministry is currently dealing with a backlog of about 100,000 trained professionals, including nurses, pharmacists, environmental health officers, and other allied health workers. Most of them completed training and obtained licences between 2021 and 2024, but remain unemployed due to the lack of financial clearance for recruitment.

He said the problem has been worsened by the gap between the number of health workers being trained and what the Ministry can realistically absorb into the public sector.

“Even if the funds were available, we cannot recruit everyone at once. Salaries must be balanced with investments in infrastructure, such as building and equipping hospitals,” he said.

While discussions with the Ministry of Finance are ongoing to secure financial clearance for new recruits, Mr Goodman said the Ministry’s recruitment strategy must be phased and planned.

He also noted that some of the backlog may be addressed through structured migration, with arrangements already in place for trained health professionals to take up employment in the United Kingdom, the United States, Jamaica, and Barbados.

Still, Mr Goodman maintained that the scale of the backlog cannot be managed effectively without stricter coordination. “There has to be a national approach. If private institutions keep training thousands more than the system can take, this challenge will persist,” he said.

The concerns come at a time when the World Health Organization has listed Ghana among 36 African countries unlikely to meet the 2030 universal health coverage target, mainly due to shortages of health workers, especially in underserved areas.

Responding to this, Mr Goodman said recruitment would continue based on available resources and within the limits of what the health system can support. He stressed that deploying health workers must be matched with the logistics and working conditions needed to make their services effective.

Source: GraphicOnline