The Ministry of Health has expressed serious concern over the rising unemployment rate among health professionals in Ghana, linking the issue partly to the rapid, unregulated growth of private health training institutions.
This statement follows an appeal by the Parliamentary Committee on Sanitation and Water Resources, which urged the Ministry of Finance to urgently disburse funds for the posting of over 2,000 Environmental Health Officer graduates. These officers, trained to combat the country’s growing sanitation crisis, have remained unposted since 2021.
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In addition to Environmental Health Officers, numerous qualified health workers across various medical specialties have also not been employed since 2021, raising concerns about inefficiencies in health sector workforce deployment.
Speaking on Accra-based Citi FM on Thursday, May 29, 2025, Ministry spokesperson Tony Goodman highlighted the mismatch between the number of graduates produced by private institutions and the actual employment opportunities within Ghana’s healthcare system.
He noted that while the Ministry aligns its training programs with specific regional and national healthcare workforce needs, most private institutions continue to enrol large student numbers without consideration for the job market demand.
“We cannot recruit everybody this year; that is going to be suicidal. We have nearly 100,000 individuals who are currently at home and have not been employed for five years. So, we cannot use a year to recruit all of them.
“You have various private training institutions that, because they have to run their institution and make a profit to be able to pay teachers, would admit and lot of numbers, churn them out, and tell the Ministry of Health to recruit them.
“The Ministry is training because there is a requirement for a particular region or so, but they [the private institutions] do not have that. Yet they train them and tell the Ministry of Health to recruit them,” he stated.
