The Vice President of the Ghana Medical Association (GMA), Dr Justice Yankson says the referral system of the country's health sector is discouraging and frustrating the works of health practitioners.

According to him, this also accounts for the high rate of attrition in the sector.

He explained that on numerous occasions when patients are referred to bigger health facilities for the purpose of advanced medical care, those places are unable to accommodate the patients. Due to the situation, patients also are unable to have access to the necessary advanced medical care.

"Even over the weekend, I had patients who said they had gone to many places. They couldn't access any emergency room, stuff like that.

"So under those circumstances, if you're a doctor, you've gotten to a point where you need to refer, you have duly referred but the system is not able to accommodate that referral in the sense that the patient cannot get timely access to the next level where the required can be given. Then you're in a fix," he said on JoyFm's Super Morning Show on Monday.

Dr Yankson added that in spite of the poor condition, doctors and nurses continue to give their best to sustain patients.

However, in the wake of the situation where a large number of health practitioners keep trooping out of the country for greener pastures in developed countries such as the US and the UK, the health expert has advised that government should desist from playing lip service and tackle the situation for "our common good."

Speaking on the show as well, a Democracy and Development Fellow on Public Health at CDD-Ghana, Kwame Sarpong Asiedu has also expressed that Ghana does not have a succession plan to replace the huge number of health workers leaving the country.

Mr Sarpong Asiedu says government does not have to wait for its best health practitioners to leave the country before it starts thinking about ways to replace them.

"If you look at our nursing cater for example. They're the registered nurses, the registered midwives, they're the auxiliary nurses, they're public health nurses and all that. Some categories of nurses are not leaving because they're not being attracted by the pull factors.

"We have a situation whereby a lot of the experienced nurses are leaving but there's no backfill plan for them. The point is that you do not wait for your best hands to leave before you start planning to replace them.

"There always has to be a succession plan and it seems to that there is no succession plan," he said.