Cabinet Approves Training of 250 Doctors by Cuban Govt

The government of Ghana has reached an agreement with the Cuban government to train about 250 Ghanaian medical doctors next year. This was announced by the acting Minister of Health, Haruna Iddrisu, Saturday, on Joy FM’s news analysis prgoramme Top Story. The disclosure comes in the wake of a two-week-long strike by doctors in the country over their migration onto the single spine salary structure, in which all pleas to them to rescind their action are yet to be considered. “I happy to know that the government has just reached a cooperation agreement with the government of Cuba to train some 250 more doctors beginning January 2012,” Haruna Iddrisu stated. He said Cabinet gave approval to the agreement at its last sitting. To ensure a fair distribution, the care-taker Minister of Health remarked: “I am insisting that we should decentralised it, so that, at least, each regional coordinating council can have at least 20 persons trained from that region, [and] dispersed across the district.” He proposed a review of the operations of the teaching hospitals in the country and believed, “in future they can be on their own if they are given some financial autonomy,” to enable them even recruit doctors. To further bridge the doctor-patient ratio gap in Ghana, he also made known that the Turkish government has also announced, through its Minister of Health, its indication to support specialist training of Ghanaian, and was upbeat the training would be extended to medical doctors. Haruna Iddrisu concurred with persons who said teaching hospitals must be made faculties of medical schools. He said government is doing its part to improve facilities at the various medical schools, and called on corporate entities to support the government's effort as part of their corporate social responsibility, so that the various medical schools can adjust their cutoff point to enroll more people.