ABOUT 500 student nurses from the Dunkwa-on-Offin Nursing and Midwifery Training College in the Central Region have stormed the Ministry of Health (MoH) to petition the minister over their unpaid allowances due them.
The student nurses who arrived in the capital yesterday morning in eight Metro Mass buses intended to march to the Ministry of Health to petition the minister, however, the police prevented them for not informing them to get an approval.
The leaders of the group had no other choice than to go and bring officials from the ministry to address their colleagues at the Independence Square.
According to them, government owes them two years allowance amounting to about GH¢12, 000, a situation which they claimed had worsened their plight of having to pay for their own tuition and clinical trials.
The petition they presented to the officials at the Human Resource Department of the ministry indicated that per the decision of government to pay all trainee nurses their allowances, the ministry is mandated to submit a list to the Ministry of Finance to issue financial clearance which mandates the Accountant and Controller General to pay all trainees having gone through the biometric registration.
They said although not all the health institutions have gone through the biometric registration, of which they are part, clearance was issued to only 47 of their colleagues out of about 860 who should be beneficiaries.
‘This came as a shock to our institution since some institutions who are more than our number have been cleared to receive their allowances and have started benefiting from the trainees’ allowance which the rest of us do not seem to comprehend,’ the petition read.
The group said petitions by the school administration and some concerned students have fallen on deaf ears.
‘We are here not to embark on a demonstration but to humbly plead to the authorities in charge to tell us something because we have lost hope in the pursuance of this allowance as to whether we are considered amongst the health training institutions in Ghana because we also deserve to equally benefit just as our colleagues have started enjoying their allowance,’ it said.
Kojo Owusu Manu from the Human Resource Department of MoH asked for some time to rectify the anomaly because the department had presented the list to the Ministry of Finance for clearance.
‘What we are doing is working as much as we can to make it work for you because you cannot go through biometric registration without financial clearance,’ he said.
The department, thus, asked for some few months to correct the mishap.
By Jamila Akweley Okertchiri
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