Post all unemployed physician assistants now

We write as aggrieved members of the Coalition of Unemployed Physician Assistants in Ghana to plead with the Ministry of Health and the Honorable Minister of Health to as a matter of urgency open the application portal for all duly registered but unemployed Physician Assistants of the 2018 and 2019 graduating batches to apply to be posted.

This group is made up mostly of the 2018 and 2019 graduating batches of Physician Assistants from all the Physician Assistantship training schools in Ghana.

The 2018 graduating batch after graduating in 2018 were expected to write their license exams in September 2018, do their induction, and start their compulsory 1-year internship before they can be permanently registered with the Medical and Dental Council of Ghana (MDC) and be permanently posted to work.

Unfortunately, things didn’t go as planned as MDC disqualified students from the Kintampo College of Health (COH-K) from writing the license exams for some reasons related to accreditation. The students from that school took MDC to court and secured an injunction to prevent MDC from going ahead to conduct the exams for the rest of the schools including students from UHAS, Central University College, GCUC, PUC, and the others.

The issue dragged in court for months and finally ended in 2019 through an out-of-court settlement that allowed the students of COH-K to sit for the exams. Both MDC and the COH-K are institutions under the Ministry of Health, so as to how such a simple issue could be allowed to drag in court to waste our time without the ministry intervening still baffles us.

In June 2019, we were finally allowed to write the license exams conducted by MDC and all of us who passed went ahead to do our mandatory 1-year internship (House Job). During the inception of Covid19, we were doing our internship and we sacrificed ourselves for this country and although we didn’t benefit from all the covid19 interventions for health workers such as tax waiver and frontline allowance because we were not on a payroll, we still sacrificed and worked hard to fight this pandemic from the beginning for the love of our country.

The 2019 batch also graduated and came to join us to do the internship in 2020 during the peak of the Covid19 and sacrificed their lives as it was being done by all health professionals.

Currently, we are all done with our mandatory internship and duly registered permanently with the Medical and Dental Council of Ghana. We are supposed to be posted by now to go and work in the numerous health facilities in the country that lacks medical staff but due to no fault of ours we are still at home and people who need healthcare especially in our rural areas cannot get it because of these unnecessary delays.

We commend the Ministry of Health for its efforts to improve our healthcare system through the Agenda 111 Hospitals and the procurement of vaccines despite all the challenges.

We are also aware that they have started some processes to post us but the progress is very slow considering the fact that all our mates from the other sister health professions including nurses, allied health, pharmacy, etc have been posted for about a year ago and currently, the ministry is employing 2019 graduating batches of Allied Health and Pharmacy cadres speaks to the fact that our postings is long overdue so we want them to fast-track the process and open our application portal for us to apply in this month before 31st August 2021.

The healthcare system is struggling and we are ready to work to complement the system so that our health system does not collapse as it happened in other countries.