The Youth Employment Agency announced earlier this year that it would be rolling out 13 employment modules to create job opportunities for the youth in the country.
Information available to the Daily Statesman indicates NDC footsoldiers enrolled under the Community Health Extension Workers’ module are being recruited into the health service after undergoing just 10 days of training at the Accra Metro Health Service at Adabraka.
At the time these shoddily trained ‘nurses’ are being posted throughout the regions of the country to start work, over 5,000 trained and qualified nurses are sitting home without jobs, with government doing nothing about their persistent appeals for postings.
These unemployed nurses are today expected to join a nation-wide demonstration to be led by National Executive Board of Ghana Nurses/Midwife Trainees' Association to, among other things, protest the failure of government to take the issue of posing of qualified nurses and midwives serious.
The Daily Statesman is aware that 15 of YEA unqualified nurses have been posted to various places in Accra, including the Usher Clinic.
Our source at the Ministry of Health has described the whole programme as a waste of government resources.
“I don’t understand why government is not prepared to use the resources being wasted to engage the services of the qualified trained nurses who have been sitting at home for over two years without posting and salary,” the source lamented.
According to the source, the move from the government is nothing but just a plan to appease some foot soldiers of the NDC, who feel let down by the Mahama government.
The source also revealed that each of the YEA nurses, who are expected to carry out immunization and semi clinical jobs on babies, are due a monthly salary of between GHc250 to GHc350.
“What even makes the postings of these unqualified nurses a danger to babies is that the ten days used in training them was not enough for them to be considered as duly qualified for crucial services like injecting babies. And this development does not auger well for a country like Ghana which is fighting to attain the MDGs on maternal and infants morality rates,” the source lamented.
It added: “I wonder why the government thinks it will not make more sense to use this same amount to pay for the allowances of the qualified but yet to be posted nurses until they are given postings.”
Meanwhile, the National Executive Board of Ghana Nurses/Midwife Trainees' Association will today lead their members to embark on a nationwide demonstration to demand from government what is long overdue them.
The demonstration, scheduled to begin at 8am at the Obra Spot, Circle, is expected to be attended by both staff and internship nurses, the unemployed and their parents.
Among the issues of concern for the demonstration are the sky-rocketing and irregular school fees charged at the various health training colleges, failure of government to pay trainees' allowance and high cost of feeding and utility bills.
The rest include the clinical charges of trainees at the clinical field and the difficulties with accessing the students’ loan, with the chronic unemployment of professionally trained and ethically prepared bonded nurses and midwives being high on the agenda.