BRAIN GAIN OR LOSS?

THE state of well-being of the people in any society determines the direction of its economic activities.
Therefore, households, families, corporate bodies and governments spend fortunes to maintain healthy communities or workforce.
That is why governments spend a huge portion of their country’s budgets to maintain the health of the people, in addition to the huge expenditure on human resource empowerment.
Majority of the people always take good care of themselves in order not to fall ill, particularly during the era of the implementation of the ‘cash-and-carry’ system. Some of our compatriots lost their lives during that time just because they could not afford deposits for treatment in state-sponsored hospitals.
The economic difficulties of the 1970s, coupled with the unfriendly world economic system, conspired to turn our health facilities into centres of ill-health instead of health care.
With the economic difficulties on the home front, many of our health workers tend to seek greener pastures abroad, leaving us with health facilities without health workers.
Although the country can boast a cadre of dedicated health workers, our health system is unable to cope with the pressure of work because of the reduced strength of health professionals.
We have accused health workers of being insensitive to the needs of the taxpayer, through whose sweat and toil they received their professional training. But with the developments on the international front, the country has a responsibility to put in place mechanisms to retain its health professionals trained at very huge cost to the taxpayer.
The Daily Graphic appeals to health professionals to be more patriotic and consider the plight of their kinsmen and women in the remotest parts of the country before making the move to seek greener pastures abroad.
It is not good enough that while our own people, trained with the taxpayer’s money, are unwilling to accept postings to the rural areas, Cuban doctors willingly agree to work in any part of the country with less remuneration.
It may sound preposterous to ask health professionals to continue to sacrifice, after spending many years in school. All the same, they must be prepared to work anywhere to save lives, in line with the Hippocratic Oath that they swear.
While ordinarily we should grimace at the reports that the Ministry of Health and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) have signed an agreement to attract 150 health workers from Europe, we should applaud the gesture because of our peculiar circumstances, as it will expand access to health care for our people, especially those in under-served areas.
Dubbed “Brain gain”, the initiative is a health sector human resource capacity-building initiative that seeks to attract and mobilise Ghanaian health professionals resident in the Diaspora back into the country to strengthen the health system.
Whatever the pros and cons of this initiative, it must be supported to stem the global migration of doctors and other health workers for greener pastures in Europe and America.
The government should, in addition to the initiative, step up its policies to offer attractive reward packages to all public sector workers.
The Daily Graphic believes we cannot have a full-proof system where all our health professionals can be retained, but let us make it unattractive for trained professionals to leave before we seek donor support to bring them back. The gains from such a venture may not be very substantial.