The World Food Programme (WFP) is asking for better conditions of service for healthcare providers in Ghana and Africa as a whole.
The Representative and Country Director of the WFP, Barbara Tulu Clemens, believes good wages will encourage and enhance quality healthcare delivery in the continent.
Speaking as a partner at the launch of Ghana Health Service Excellence Awards Scheme under the theme ‘Our Heroes, Our Lifeline,’ she emphasised the need for healthcare providers to be acknowledged with dignity.
“They have parents who spent money on them for school and so they deserve a living wage not just for living but one that they can invest with, send their kids to good school,” he appealed passionately.
She said she is very passionate about her appeal because healthcare providers must be compensated if that’s where their passion lies so they don’t regret their choice because it is not paying well.
She said the bad salary for healthcare providers across the continent has caused many good nurses and doctors to seek for greener pastures.
“When I look at the disparity between the wages of healthcare providers in Africa and the ones abroad, many of our good doctors and nurses have to leave their own country abroad to make wage they can live and thrive by,” she lamented.
The WFP Country Representative also congratulated the GHS for introducing an award scheme to empower healthcare providers and again entreated all gathered at the event to make sure compensation for healthcare providers are such that they will be motivated to deliver good healthcare for the country of their birth.