To our dear learned Prof. who has made calls for the allowances of student nurses to be scrapped and seems to be championing the campaign in the media.

On the 25th of December 2013, and any other Christmas day in this country, student nurses and midwives all over Ghana are on clinical duties across hospitals and health facilities scattered across the length and breadth of this country - we know no holiday!

Yet, we gladly serve for we know that is the call of our profession. We are in this holiday season as well as every other time when we go on vacation working (though in training) like staff in the same situations, exposed to the same risks, performing the same tasks etc.

Dear Prof., in your call, you may be forgetting that apart from student nurses and midwives other students of most professions are not compelled to work compulsorily during vacation or even have periods of breaks within regular semesters for work duties.

Our profession is unique - granted as to why our training and course is structured that way... then of course if we understand that it is unique, then we indeed can't be bundled up in the same box like other professionals.

For example, I do not see that every engineering student is expected to build machines every vacation or have periods intra-semester for doing so... or that even where persons from the profession which seems to be the yardstick for comparison to us (our respected colleagues from the teaching profession) have to undergo and observe such a rigourous schedule as part of their training.

To me dear Prof., you should know better than to compare the student nurse /midwife to the student teacher because our training is different in its requirement and function as well as even our role in the socio-economic development of our country.

Or are you Prof. saying that we do not deserve allowances the care we give to patients at the wards, the deliveries we assist to and make, the wound dressings, the ANC clinics we handle, the vital signs and other tasks we undertake during our clinicals is not valid, because we are students?How can deliveries and all that not be valid, I ask you? How can the lives we help to save not be valid, I ask again?

We as student nurses and midwives are not in any way enthused by your myopic assessment of the challenges we face in our training and your supposed blindness to the validly genuine reasons why government sponsorship of student nurses and midwives is of essence.

As a person who has worked in the health care sector for many years, I least expected that you would of all people not know better. Are you, learned Prof., also not aware of the high amounts we pay as our school fees?

Or do you not know that the amount of fees paid by student nurses and midwives per annum is higher than that of medical students even?

 Such matters should be your concern if you love Ghana and want to help Ghanaians because that is what we are... ordinary Ghanaians who depend on such allowances to enable us pay our school fees, buy books, attend clinicals and in that way help Ghana to develop by caring for its citizenry right from the very first semesters we are admitted into nursing schools.

Honourable Prof., I am sure that you are a well travelled man and so in your travels you may definitely have come across countries where although a student loan structure is in place for students studying and training in other fields, student nurses, given the nature of their profession, are still given allowances. If yu do not know, I will cite only one example, the UK.

Moreso, Prof.your sympathies should be with the people of Ghana who will suffer gravely if nurses upon their completion of study are not bonded to stay in the country. Or you seem not to be aware of the fact that there are lucrative markets out there for nurses? I say, Prof. if you indeed love Ghana, then please use your voice to call on the government to help in moving nursing to the next level as exists elsewhere where advanced nursing programmes that equip and enable nurses to do more in clinical settings to augment the role of doctors and other health professionals is the focus of health care policy direction and delivery.

Contrary to your assumed position, there are a lot of things you should rather be championing: You should be calling on the government to collaborate with the Nursing and Midwifery Council of Ghana (NMC) to clamp down on quack nurses in the system.

You can throw your weight behind the challenging struggle faced by the various nursing colleges in the provision of quality training infrastructure. Also, before you even talk on the matter of increasing admissions into nursing schools, please kindly reflect on the benefits of having a degree focused basic training and qualification for nurses and not the diploma based programmes that we seem to be stagnated at for so many years. Ghana is developing, and such should be your prime concern!

We know that you may bear no malice towards student nurses and midwives and that you only want what is good for Ghana and this profession, but we implore you that before you come against any positive intervention in place to help us you rather start by helping us address the challenges we face. 

At least you should be calling on government to allow us to pursue advanced programmes earlier than the three years minimum required amongst other things.

Dear Prof. Please call for progress and not retrogression!!  May God bless Ghana. May God bless us all!