Ministry of Health Blames Unchecked Private Training Institutions for Health Worker Unemployment Surge
ACCRA | May 29, 2025 — The Ministry of Health has expressed alarm over the surging number of unemployed health workers in Ghana, citing the unregulated expansion of private health training institutions as a key contributing factor.
This revelation follows renewed calls by the Parliamentary Committee on Sanitation and Water Resources urging the Ministry of Finance to immediately release funds for the posting of more than 2,000 Environmental Health Officer graduates, who have remained unemployed since 2021 despite the country’s worsening sanitation crisis.
The problem, however, goes beyond environmental officers. According to the Ministry, thousands of trained professionals across multiple healthcare disciplines—including nurses, laboratory technicians, and public health officers—have also remained unposted since 2021.
Speaking on the Citi Breakfast Show on Thursday, May 29, Health Ministry spokesperson Tony Goodman highlighted that private health training institutions continue to admit and graduate large numbers of students without regard to the sector’s employment capacity or national manpower needs.
“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,” Goodman stated.
He explained that while the Ministry of Health bases its training and recruitment projections on regional and national staffing needs, many private institutions operate with profit as their primary motive, admitting more students than the system can absorb.
“You have various private training institutions that… would admit a lot of numbers, churn them out, and tell the Ministry of Health to recruit them,” he added.
The Ministry is now grappling with a backlog of nearly 100,000 unemployed health professionals, some of whom have remained without jobs for up to five years.
The government’s failure to post these graduates has sparked growing concern, especially as the country continues to battle public health challenges such as poor sanitation, disease outbreaks, and staff shortages in underserved communities.
Stakeholders are calling for better regulation of private health training institutions, transparent recruitment plans, and inter-ministerial collaboration to tackle the rising unemployment among trained health professionals.
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