Health facilities across the Upper East Region are operating below the minimum staffing threshold that requires at least one nurse and one midwife on site at any given time, the regional leadership of the Union of Professional Nurses and Midwives of Ghana (UPNMG) has disclosed, raising urgent questions about patient safety in one of the country’s most medically underserved areas.
Apandango Mohammed Musah, Upper East Regional President of UPNMG, made the disclosure during the union’s regional annual general conference in Bolgatanga on Thursday, February 20, 2026. He warned that the shortage is not a marginal deficit but a structural gap that leaves communities, particularly women in labour and patients requiring round-the-clock care, exposed to preventable risks.
The disclosure lands against a troubling national backdrop. Ghana currently has over 74,000 trained nurses and health workers who have been unable to secure postings due to budgetary constraints, even as facilities across the country report critical shortfalls. That backlog is projected to reach 180,000 by 2028 without decisive government intervention. The paradox, a country simultaneously producing too many nurses for its payroll and running facilities without enough hands, has become one of the most pressing structural failures in Ghana’s health sector.
Ghana’s nurse-to-population ratio currently stands at 1 nurse for every 839 people, and while the number of registered general nurses reached 76,158 by 2025, migration is compounding the gap significantly, with an estimated 7,000 nurses having left Ghana since 2022.
The Upper East Region has historically borne a disproportionate share of this burden. Research on midwifery in the region has documented a consistent pattern in which shortages of personnel, combined with inadequate equipment, outdated hospital infrastructure, and delayed emergency medical responses, converge to undermine the quality of maternal healthcare available to women in the region.
Musah also used the conference to address internal professional concerns, urging members to uphold integrity and resist intimidation, and advocating for a digital licence renewal system that would allow nurses and midwives to renew their Personal Identification Numbers (PINs) and Auxiliary Identification Numbers (AINs) independently rather than through deductions processed by their unions. He affirmed that the UPNMG is committed to collaboration with the Ghana Health Service and all stakeholders to improve conditions of service for members.
The government has announced plans to hire additional health workers as part of the broader health sector expansion under the 2026 budget. Whether those plans translate to postings in underserved regions like the Upper East will determine whether the staffing crisis the union has described continues to worsen or finally begins to ease.
