The Director of the College of Medicine and Allied Sciences (CoMAS), Kingsley Aboagye-Gyedu, has urged the Government to partner with the private sector to train more health personnel for “export” and to match in-country demand.

To achieve the goal, he suggested to the government to create an enabling environment for private sector players to invest in the health training  sector.

The move, he said, would help address vacancies created in health facilities across the country due to emigration of health workers to seek greener pastures overseas and also help to reduce the increasing youth unemployment in the country.

Mr Aboagye-Gyedu who was speaking in an interview with the Ghana News Agency in Accra said the training of more health workers and officially exporting them to other countries could be another source of income to the state.

“One of the major challenges facing Ghana’s health sector today is inadequate medical officers and other health personnel. This has resulted in high patient-doctor ratio,” he said.

Mr Aboagye-Gyedu, a Former Deputy Health Minister, said at the beginning of the year 2022, there were about 79 district hospitals with no doctors.

“This is below the average number of doctors and other health personnel a country needs. Their distribution across the country is skewed, urban areas have more while the rural areas have less,” he said.

“Ghana has produced a lot of doctors over the years and it is believed that Ghanaian doctors working overseas are more than doctors working in the country. This has left many hospitals, especially in the rural areas unmanned.”

The Director said it was for that reason that the CoMAS was seeking to increase the number of medically trained professionals in the country.

He said CoMAS was the first among its peers to run Graduate Entry Medical Programme (GEMP), a system that allows first degree holders with a second class lower Honours  or above in any science related programme to pursue a four-and-half year medical programme.

Mr Aboagye-Gyedu said the new avenue would enable students with the required background and grades who could not pursue medical studies due to limited space at the public universities to do so.

CoMAS, also offer programmes in Medical Imaging (Radiography and Sonography), and Health Information Management