Jubilant nurses mob Akufo-Addo over allowance restoration

Ecstatic trainee nurses thronged the streets to welcome Akufo-Addo to the Brong Ahafo Region for the launch of the restoration of their allowances scrapped by the Mahama administration.

The restoration which takes effect from September 2017 will see each of the about 58,000 trainees receive GHC400 per month. Trainee nurses pay about GHC2000 per semester as tuition. This makes at least ?4,000 a year. The government is paying GHC400 to cover 10 months of each year which makes it GHC4,000 in allowance.

With the restoration, the nurses are assured that burdens on parents and guardians will be reduced drastically.

The restoration of the Nursing trainee allowance was a key New Patriotic Party (NPP) campaign promise after the John Mahama administration scrapped it to allow the various training colleges to admit more students.

During the 2016 electioneering campaign, the NPP vowed that the restoration was non-negotiable while then President John Mahama maintained that he would rather lose the elections than restore the allowance.

After the Mahama government earmarked a students’ loan scheme in place of the allowance, it agreed to pay a reduced allowance for the trainees temporarily until such a time that they are finally moved onto the students’ loan scheme. This decision was met with protests by the nurses.

President Akufo-Addo having fulfilled the promise says the need for a world-class health care system makes it necessary for the government to provide relevant incentives such as the Nursing trainee allowance to make it possible.

“This morning, at the Sunyani Nursing and Midwifery Training College, I fulfilled, yet, another campaign pledge made to the people of Ghana in the run-up to the 2016 elections - the Restoration of the Nursing and Midwifery Training Allowances.

“The pledge was not mere political rhetoric, campaign talk, and neither was it to deceive nursing trainees in order to get their votes. It was much more than that.

“We believed, and still believe, that Ghana needs all the nurses and healthcare workers she can get, if the nation is to have a solid, world-class healthcare system, and we think it necessary to provide the relevant incentives to make that possible” his Facebook post read.