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Ghana requires about 1,500 paediatric nurses in the next five years to meet the health needs of children in the country, the Deputy Minister of Health, Dr Nii Oakley Kuma Quaye, has indicated.
The need, he said, was to shore up the number of paediatric nurses in the country to help improve the child mortality rate.
Speaking at the launch of the Paediatric Nursing Training Programme in Accra, the deputy minister said it was necessary to make a conscious effort to train the needed human resource to help address the current health needs of the country.
The training programme, which is a collaborative effort between Ghana and Canada, with the support of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), is to assist the University of Ghana School of Nursing to give exposure to practising nurses in paediatric care.
Furthermore, it seeks to train nurses in the districts and sub-districts.
“It is in this regard that the government of Ghana is grateful to the Hospital For Sick Children and CIDA for the effort to advance global child health with a view to generating relevant research on child health in Ghana,” Dr Quaye said.
He said paediatric care was one vital area the ministry had made efforts to promote over the years, since the absence of adequate care threatened the workforce and population of the country.
Dr Quaye said the training would be based on the community-based Health Planning and Services with nurses from health institutions in the districts.
The Canadian High Commissioner to Ghana, Mr Darren Schemmer, said Canada had had a long history of development co-operation with Ghana since independence, which had made Ghana Canada’s first development partner in Africa.
He said the initiative was another important step in the collaboration of both countries to help improve health care in Ghana.
Mr Schemmer said CIDA provided assistance for Ghana’s health sector through direct budget support for the country, especially in the three regions of the north.
He said most countries were finding it difficult to achieve the target of reducing maternal and child mortality under the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
The initiator of the programme, Dr Isaac Odame, who is also a staff physician at the University of Toronto, said Ghanaians living abroad should be given the opportunity to undertake initiatives that would help develop the country.
He advised the government to also initiate such collaborations to motivate Ghanaians living abroad to come back to the country to help.