Lack of continuous education is cause of brain drain

Accra, Nov. 17, GNA - The lack of continuous medical education for health professionals is one of the causes of brain drain in the country, Dr Kofi Ahmed, Chief Medical Officer of the Ministry of Health (MOH) said on Monday. "Health workers are travelling abroad these days not for greener pastures but they are leaving the country to upgrade themselves," he said. Dr Ahmed noted that health workers, who did not upgrade themselves, only grew stale.

He, therefore, called on health regulatory bodies to come out with strategic programmes that would provide incentives and also upgrade its members periodically so that they could meet up to the challenges in their work.

Dr Ahmed, who was contributing to a roundtable conference discussion on Information Technology for 21 health professionals in Accra, said the MOH would in turn go along with such programmes to enhance health delivery in the country.

The conference organized by Ghana Information Network for Knowledge Sharing (GINKS), a non-governmental organization, was aimed at finding ways of providing continuous medical education through the use of information and communication products such as newsletters, Internet and CD ROMs. Dr Ahmed underscored the importance of the information technology to the health professionals and called for the provision of communication facilities at the district level so that workers could be abreast with latest technologies.

He said the MOH and the Howard University, USA and the World Bank were discussing ways of commencing the use of tele-medicine in Ghana. In line with this, he said, the MOH and the Ghana Health Service (GHS) had developed a website to help with information flow.

He urged the media to assist medical professionals with airtime and spaces to disseminate information on medical issues to all. Mr Isaac Adams, Head of Information Monitoring and Evaluation, GHS, noted that very little priority was given to data and planning.

He said information sometimes produced by health professional bore no relationship with the current priority to the MOH and urged them to develop the contents and the packaging of information they collated.

Mr Adams called on leaders of professional health workers to develop the culture of writing so that their reports could be used in planning for effective health care delivery.