The Private University Students Association of Ghana (PUSAG) has appealed to government to employ about 60% to 70% of private universities students especially nurses.
According to them government’s failure to facilitate their employment is worsening their predicament since most of the private nurses have been unemployed for several years after their training.
Speaking on the Point Blank segment on Eyewitness News, President of the Association, Alswell Annan said that though government has fulfilled it’s promise by employing 18,000 health officials so far, it has failed to employ health officials from the private institutions.
“I want to commend government for clearing the backlog from 2012 to 2016, by employing 18,000 health officers. That notwithstanding, the search allocation was done solely to public nursing schools and that is where we have a problem. The President, through the Information Minister, made it clear that they are going to recruit about 54,000 nurses. Now since the previous years, those who were recruited were solely for the public institutions,” he said.
He noted that since both private and public nurses go through the same training, they should not be excluded.
The nurses also claimed that the government is discriminating against them by posting only nurses from public training institutions.
“We are appealing to the government to also allocate about 60 -70% of the quota for health officials to the private universities since the private university students go through the same training as the public university students. We don’t see why there should be a total segregation when it comes to this matter, because they write the national licensing examination as those in the public,” he added.
On her part, General Secretary for the Association, Linda Amoako said though, “we did not sign any agreement with government, we do clinicals in government hospitals. When we finish school, we do rotation instead of national service, at the government hospitals, thus we are accountable to the government in some ways.”
Increasing pressure for employment
In May, this year, the Minister of Health, Kwaku Agyemang Manu stated that government has since 2017 recruited over 54,000 health personnel in the country.
He said government has also digitized the recruitment and placement of personnel in its quest to ease the processes.
However, The Ministry of Health announced earlier this year that it had commenced the recruitment of privately and publicly unemployed but trained nurses who received their certification between 2012 and 2016.
The application period for recruitment is started on 1st July at and ended on 12th July.