Wa, May 20, GNA – The Upper West Regional Director of Ghana Health Service (GHS), Dr Osei Kufour Afreh, has expressed dissatisfaction about growing indiscipline among nurses in some health facilities and called for an end to the negative practice.
He specifically condemned rising negative attitudes such as nurses and midwives attending to patients whilst speaking on mobile phones, showing up to the workplace late, and exhibiting sheer laziness during working hours as well as putting up wrong dress code.
He said such unruly professional practices and misbehaviours did not augur well for the image of the Ghana Health Service and the professions of nursing and midwifery.
Dr Afreh was speaking at this year’s Ghana Registered Nurses and Midwives Association (GRNMA) week celebration climax in the Upper West Regional capital, Wa, which was on the theme: “Health for all: Nurses and Midwives, a voice to lead”.
The Nurses and Midwives week is observed annually in commemoration of Florence Nightingale, a British social reformer and statistician, whose hard work, innovation and dedication to the sick and wounded earned her the enviable title, mother of modern-day nursing and midwifery.
Dr Afreh apportioned blame to past recruiters, saying many nurses were enrolled into the system via protocol and because of that, unqualified persons found their way into the sector which was contributing to the gross indiscipline.
He was unhappy about the practice of protocol system in recruiting professionals as it could lead to infiltration of many unqualified personnel whose activities could undermine efficient service delivery and endanger lives.
According to him, his outfit has been inundated with a lot of messages from the ‘so-called big men’ in society asking to post their children to their preferred hospitals where in many cases their services were not needed there.
“When we are posting people base on needs where services are needed for people to improve health care delivery, some big men would be demanding their children to be posted to their preferred places and such children are untouchable, which is causing the indiscipline in the system,” he said.
He encouraged the public to report nurses who treated clients unfairly to the authorities to be investigated and dealt with, so as to bring back discipline into the health system.
In a speech read on his behalf, the Upper West Regional Minister, Dr Hafiz Bin-Salih, said nurses and midwives ought to play their parts well in handling patients professionally, to restore some level of trust and confidence in the professions.
He said government had taken steps to improve the finances of health facilities that, most of the debt accumulated under the National Health Insurance Scheme had been cleared.
Ms Victoria Dohoro Dangori, the Upper West Regional Chairperson of GRNMA, said specialists in the nursing and midwifery profession must strive to emulate the shining example of Florence Nightingale and be more professional in admitting their clients.
She said they should be friendlier to patients so that people who visited health facilities would appreciate the good work of nurses and midwives do on daily basis.
GNA
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