3,400 Allied Health professionals granted financial clearance – Oko Boye

The Ministry of Health has secured financial clearance for about 3,400 Allied Health professionals across the country, according to Deputy Health Minister, Dr. Benard Oko Boye.

This means that soon health professionals will be able to apply for postings to the various health centres.

This was disclosed when 170 Allied Health graduates were inducted by the Allied Health profession council on Wednesday.

“We had a backlog of close to 4,000 people. As we speak, the government has given a financial clearance of about 3,400 and the portal will be open in the coming weeks so they can go online and apply and be posted across the country,” the Deputy Minister said to Citi News.

In April, members of the 2017 and 2018 batch of unemployed Allied Health Professionals threatened to demonstrate to register their displeasure over government’s inability to grant them financial clearance.

Some of these professionals involved in the COVID-19 contact tracing even pulled out of the exercise claiming that the Ministry of Health was treating them unfairly.

Dr. Oko Boye also admonished the newly inducted Allied Health professionals not to reject postings to remote communities.

He noted that since he took up this office, there has been a lot of pressure on the Ministry for reposting.

For him, this is an issue “that is very pressing and very dire.”

“People who have been posted to other regions apart from Greater Accra and Ashanti Region are coming back asking us to re-route them to Accra and Kumasi.”

“You cannot have a situation where 80 to 90 percent of all our staff are caught up in only two regions,” Dr. Oko Boye said.

He further stressed that, following the financial clearance, the posted health workers “must also show good faith by accepting postings to other regions… those who get trained as medical professionals must be willing to go to any part of this country.”