The Ghana Health Service (GHS) has disclosed that it is actively working to address the challenges posed by brain drain, which is significantly impacting the health sector.
Brain drain refers to the loss of human capital as professionals migrate from one region or industry to another.
In the case of Ghana, more than 1,200 Ghanaian nurses reportedly joined the United Kingdom’s nursing register last year, and approximately 150 experienced nurses and health professionals from Pantang Hospital have sought opportunities abroad.
Speaking at the 2023 Joseph Siaw Agyapong distinguished lecture on public health in Africa, held in commemoration of the University of Ghana’s 75th anniversary, Dr Patrick Kuma-Aboagye, Director General of the GHS, acknowledged brain drain as a major challenge.
“Brain drain remains a key challenge for us and there are usually ways when there are shortages in the developed countries, there is also the drift of people going there. So what we are doing is first, trying to encourage as many to stay. We are also ensuring that those who are staying are also being trained rapidly.
“We are recruiting to replace those we can replace while we ensure that we are giving more people especially the nurses study leave allocations so that we can convert some of the nonprofessional nurses into professional ones because it is the majority of professional nurses who are leaving,” he stated.
Dr Kuma-Aboagye further expressed concerns over the increase in non-communicable diseases in recent years, and thus called for a behaviour change in lifestyle among the public.
“There are statistics that the number of hypertension are going up, diabetics are going up. We don’t think that a sedentary lifestyle is good, not many people are exercising. There is a lot of junk foods coming in, we need to ensure that we eat proper foods, look at the timing of eating, the use of alcohol, cigarette smoking and aphrodisiac,” he stated.
He used the opportunity to urge the media to help raise awareness of the diseases to increase public knowledge.
