Ghana e-Education for Nurses and Midwives - Interviews
As of Monday, June 13, 2022, Ghana's current population stands at 32,332,114 based on Worldometer elaboration of the latest United Nations data. Considering the World Bank's collection of development indicators on Ghana concerning historical data, forecasts, and projections on Nurses and midwives - in March 2022, also points to the fact that nurses and midwives constituted 2.711 per thousand (for every 1,000 people) in Ghana by the end of the year 2019. The World Data Atlas also projected that given Ghana's statistics of nurses and midwives population which transitioned from 1.2 per thousand people in 2009, to 2.7 in 2019, which occurred at a rate of 16.06 percent. Therefore, our e-Education company relying on this rate of change projects the population of nurses and midwives to hit 3.146 per thousand people in 2022, which translates to a market size of 101,716.83 nurses and midwives in a population of 32,332 million Ghanaians. The nursing and midwifery education in Ghana has witnessed minimal advancement though one of the earliest in Africa mainly as a result of the many challenges it faces. Our recently completed E2E feasibility study, which sought to better understand the present nursing and midwifery educational landscape in Ghana among other objectives, employed both quantitative and qualitative data collection methodologies, including survey administration and one-on-one interviews with experts, revealing the following outcome:
Our panel of experts, which included heads/administrators of nursing and midwifery training institutions/universities, senior staff from teaching, regional, and district hospitals/clinics, and senior staff from the National Nursing and Midwifery Council, all agreed that the current educational system is fraught with inadequate infrastructure leading to large class sizes and subsequent overcrowding in almost all government training institutions.
9 out of the 11 experts also spoke about insufficient teacher-to-student ratio and limited physical contact hours which in most cases results in difficulties in comprehensively evaluating students and satisfying the curricular requirements in most situations.
Another major challenge raised was the absence of course materials to act as reference/referral sources for students/professionals, particularly those in the field of practice. According to these experts, negligence is one of the key causes of the country's rising mortality rate, and they feel that the lack of access to learning materials by many practitioners is a major contributing factor. Last but not least, 8 out of the 11 experts also mentioned that the absence of a Problem-based learning curriculum which may, among other things, expose students to best nursing/midwifery practices thereby improving the quality of students churned out each year was yet another major challenge.
Written by Abigail Maame Dede For MEDx eHealthCenter