Pharmacist and Research Fellow at the Centre for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana), Kwame Sarpong Asiedu, has lamented how doctors and other health professionals are denied promotion despite upgrading their knowledge and skills in their respective fields.

He said this development has and still compels a lot of well-equipped healthcare professionals to migrate to other countries in search of greener pastures.

“We need to look at this whole issue of health worker employment where we do not have enough by the WHO standard, but we cannot employ them because we do not have the fiscal space.

“From a Human Resource Management point of view, in the health sector, it is diabolical and crazy that if you speak to doctors and nurses, if they even take their own time to go to school without getting a study leave and get the skills required and they even want the promotion in the Ghana Health Service of Ministry of Health, they are denied because they are told ‘you didn’t get a study leave so you cannot be promoted,” he said.

Meanwhile, these skills are being accepted in countries like the UK and if you frustrate someone like that who is a consultant and say I’ll still pay you as a medical officer because you didn’t get a study leave, they’ll come to the UK.

He was contributing to discussions that centered on the spate of Ghanaian health professionals exiting the country in search of greener pastures on the Super Morning Show, Thursday.

According to a document sighted by JoyNews from the House of Commons in the UK, there are a total of 3,395 doctors of Ghanaian origin working in the United Kingdom.

Meanwhile, Ghana had a total of 3,236 doctors as of 2021, according to statistics.com. This indicates that there are more doctors of Ghanaian origin working in the UK than those currently working in Ghana.

Dr. Asiedu Sarpong, thus called on authorities to address these issues else risk losing more competent health professionals.

“We need a paradigm shift in the Human Resource Management strategy of our health sector. So if things don’t change, we can talk for all we want, but nothing will change,” he added.