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Director General of the Ghana Health Service (GHS), has proposed that health professionals must be made to look for jobs themselves once they graduate.

Dr. Anthony Nsiah Asare said the practice of posting them must be stopped to ensure a fair distribution of health workers across the country.

Speaking at the opening of the Annual Conference of the Christian Health Association of Ghana (CHAG) in Sunyani in the Brong Ahafo Region, he called for an urgent solution to staffing problems in the country.

“The present bottlenecks in ensuring that all staffing of existing health facilities simply has to be tackled now, not tomorrow. I am urging your conference to come out pragmatic measures to address this long-standing challenge in the sector,” he said on Wednesday.

“I believe we should stop postings, we should allow every health worker to go and look for a job,” Dr  Nsiah Asare suggested.

He explained that if the proposal was  adopted, the health service will announce the vacancies in the respective regions of the country for the health professionals to apply for the positions, go through the interview process and if they are picked they start work.

It is common to see unemployed health workers picketing at the Health Ministry to demand postings. Government over the years has struggled to deal with this challenge.

In February this year, the government told graduate nurses to stop picketing at the Ministry as plans were  far advanced to employ them.

The Information Minister, Mustapha Hamid, said the Finance Ministry had given clearance for them to be employed. He, however, did not state specifically which month they will be engaged.

“This year, government is employing 32,000 health professionals, and out of that 27,000 are nurses.

“The 32,000 are graduates from 2014 to 2016, who are going to be employed, these are people who were left unattended to by the previous administration and we are going to employ them,” he said.

However, the GHS Director-General told the Conference, the Service is fighting for financial clearance for the employment of health professional to come with no names attached.

Dr Nsiah Asare added “that way, we [GHS] can then ask the regions to do their own interviews and accept people.”