The Registrar of the Ghana Medical and Dental Council, Dr. Divine Banyubala, says the Council had since 2017 expressed concern about the quality of Ghanaian medical students some foreign medical universities were churning out.

This had resulted in the government of Ghana sending a delegation to those countries particularly in Europe’s eastern bloc and China to address those concerns.

Their findings, Dr. Banyubala said, had resulted in the Council’s current policy on foreign trained Ghanaian medical students wanting to practice in the country.

“Our findings have led to a number of policy decisions to better the conditions of training in those countries but also improve and expand on our local training opportunities so that we’ll reduce the need for our compatriots to make that difficult journey,” he said.

“We visited seven medical universities and had a full day’s debriefing engagement with the Deputy Minister of Education and Science of Ukraine. In fact, all of the universities we visited we met the Vice Chancellors and all the deans and we presented to them our serious concerns,” he added.

The concerns of the Ghanaian delegation were about the low admission criteria into these foreign medical institutions and the manner of recruiting students into them.

“The admission criteria were completely unacceptable anywhere in the world. In fact, students were being recruited from the malls, people were taken without the requisite backgrounds to the extent that even there was no authentication of certificates and one of the cases, I mean, my former boss, the immediate past registrar, led the other team to China.

“And this was with Ministers and Deputy Ministers and Parliamentary Select Committee leadership. In fact, in China some of them said when they see aggregate F, because in China they have G and H, they think it’s a pass,” he revealed on JoyNews’ PM Express.

He added that, “People didn’t have the requisite background, people have done Carpentry the best grade is D7 and then they have gone and come back as doctors. People have done Literature-in-English without any pre-med. So this led to the policy on the training of medical and dental students in foreign jurisdictions.”

According to him, the recent pronouncement by the Council to not recognize students who had recently graduated from war-torn Ukraine due to concerns about the quality of their studies as most had carried on with teaching and learning via online classes is borne from this policy document and not from malice.

“And we specifically went, and that is why we don’t want this to be that doctors trained from Ukraine are not wanted. That is not a fair reflection of first what the notice conveys and second what the position of the Medical and Dental Council is.

“That team we went with, one of the deans of the medical schools at the time actually trained in Kharkov to show to them that in the past the quality we were getting from there we’re no longer getting that quality. And as a good partner it’s important we give them a feedback so that our people are not being shortchanged for less than adequate medical education at a huge commercial cost,” he said.