A Democracy and Development Fellow on Public Health at CDD-Ghana, Kwame Sarpong Asiedu has expressed that Ghana does not have a succession plan in the wake of the high attrition rate in its health sector.

Mr Sarpong Asiedu said 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 on JoyNews’ AM show on Monday.

The health expert has also lamented that there is no deliberate effort from government to curb the worrying situation.

He explained that officials seem to be playing politics with the situation and that such a posture might be thwarting any possible solution.

He, therefore, advised that government should, first of all, acknowledge that there the country has problems in the health sector.

The size of these problems needs to be quantified, after which government should devise a clear human resource strategy to tackle them.

“The first way to fix a problem is to acknowledge there is a problem. But if you have people in political leadership telling us, oh we have employed the highest number of nurses ever since, and they’re churning out numbers in bulk, but we are not acknowledging the problem.

“So the first thing for me is to acknowledge that we have a problem. Then the second thing is to then quantify the size of the problem, and then have a clear human resource strategy in place to fix the problem,” he added.

Ghana is grappling with issues of health practitioners leaving the country for greener pastures due to low conditions of service and poor remuneration.

Due to the high rate at which these health workers were leaving government went into an agreement with the UK government where many of these nurses sought quality working conditions.

But experts have warned that should the situation persist, Ghana risks grave health implications in some years to come because the country needs the health workers than the countries into which they are heading.