Volta University To Make First Admissions In September
The University of Health and Allied Sciences (UHAS) in the Volta Region will open in September, this year, with the admission of its first batch of 200 students.
Eight courses which would be pursued by the students include Bachelor’s degrees in Basic & Biomedical Sciences, Allied Health Sciences, Nursing & Midwifery, Public Health and Dentistry.
The rest are Pharmacy, Medicine and Graduate School for Sports and Exercise Medicine.
The Vice-Chancellor of the university, Professor Fred Binkah, announced this at a public forum to interact with stakeholders and the general public on the status of the new university at Ho yesterday.
According to Prof Binkah, the council of the university would at the end of April, this year, submit its programmes to the National
Accreditation Board (NAB) for approval following which adverts would be run for prospective applicants to apply for admission.
He said that the university would be built on two major pillars of community service and research, adding that as part of its mandatory programmes, students would be required to do eight weeks of community service.
Prof Binkah said work on the permanent site of the university at Sokode-Lokoe had begun, giving the assurance that structures would be in place before the second batch of students would be admitted next academic year.
He said, however, that the people who would run the university should be of prime concern and not the structures per se.
Professor Binkah said for now, the incubatory facilities had been put in place to provide the needed platform for the start of the university.
He said talks were in progress for the upgrading of the Volta Regional Hospital into a teaching hospital and the absorption of all health training institutions in the region as affiliates.
The Chairman of the UHAS Council, Professor Kofi Anyidoho, said all key officers needed for the take-off of the university had been interviewed, adding that deans for the various faculties had been interviewed.
“So far, we have not done badly. We’ve managed to assemble some of the best brains in the country to come on board and we are very impressed with what has been achieved so far,” he said.
He said that much preparatory work had been done but more needed to be done, saying if people were not seeing physical structures as they wanted to, it was because “a university is not like a mushroom that one wakes up one day to find.”
He paid tribute to the committee set up by President John Attah Mills to oversee the setting up of the university for coming up with a detailed blueprint for the university.
The Volta Regional Minister, Mr Henry Ford Kamel, said that much had been done by the committees set up by the President to ensure the establishment of the university but that the progress made had not been properly communicated to the people of the region and Ghanaians for that matter.