Editorial
The Coalition of Unemployed Graduate Nurses which is made up of the Nurse Assistant Clinical (NAC) and Nurse Assistant Preventive (NAP) 2019 group yesterday picketed at the premises of the Ministry of Finance to demand immediate posting and financial clearance for the permanent employment of nurses in the country.
This action is to register their displeasure to the government after successfully graduating from various accredited public institutions three years ago without being employed.
According to them it has been Ten (10) months since they accessed the recruitment portal with the degree and diploma nurses but they have since not been posted while they are made to wait with no valid reasons.
They explained that all efforts and engagements with the Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Health and all stakeholders on several occasions to get them posted has not yielded and therefore they decided that picketing at the Finance Ministry is the right thing to do in order to make show their displeasure and anger with the government.
The Daily Searchlight is of the opinion that the time has come for Ghana to think seriously about decentralizing many aspects of our public policy.
The fact of the matter, is that the highly centralized systems we have with institutions such as health, education, security, finance and others often leads to serious inefficiencies in delivery.
We believe, for instance, that if healthcare delivery had been standardized and decentralized, new and unemployed nurses would not have been enabled to attack a government institution demanding to be employed and paid, after they had been trained under subsidized conditions.
They would have applied to the appropriate institutions to be employed, just like anybody else.
If the hospitals, for instance, had the autonomy to raise their own funds, use these funds with a reasonable degree of independence, and employ as and when needed, and dictate the conditions at the unit level, many of the strikes and agitation we are seeing today, would have been avoidable.
We believe, therefore, that government should give the concept of autonomy for many of our state institutions greater thought and consideration, since this would lead to improved standards and greater employee harmony.
(This article was first published in the column EDITORIAL of the Daily Searchlight of Wednesday, August 22, 2022. The Daily Searchlight appears on the newsstands of Ghana every working day and PDF versions are available for sale online twenty-four hours a day all day throughout the world on www.ghananewsstand.com).
