Nursing And Midwifery Council Of Ghana Needs A System Review

The Nursing and Midwifery Council of Ghana is the regulatory body that monitors and regulates the activities of nurses and midwives in Ghana. The Council is also responsible for the examination of student nurses and midwives that leads to the award of their professional license.

For over 42 years now, the council has successfully organized licensing examination for nurses and midwives in the country and remains one of the most credible and focused regulatory bodies in the country. Its fairness and firmness cannot be over emphasized.

Just recently, the council rolled out its online examination, beginning with the Registered Mental Nursing programs in the 2018 basic program licensing exams. It is expected that other programs would also have their turn during this year’s licensing examination sitting. The initiative has been lauded by all and is regarded as an innovative approach to reducing the time involved in manual marking and tallying.

However, one critical area the council has not paid much attention to over the years, is the making available the results of licensing examinations online for candidates to check and possibly proceed to do their registration online as well. After every release of examination results by the N&MC, candidates are expected to move from wherever they are, to their various institutions of training before they can have access to their results; this undoubtedly involves some risk taking, monetary issues and a total time and energy wastage. Ghana is currently among the countries within the sub-Saharan Africa which is growing quickly in terms of technology. I therefore do not think that this would be a difficult thing to do at all.

On Friday, 11^th January 2019, for instance, two young qualified midwives (names withheld) met their untimely death after going for their results at their training institution (name of college withheld). I strongly believe that, this situation could have been different if they had had the opportunity to check their results online without moving an inch from their homes or communities.

N&MC should therefore look into this issue more critically and give it the necessary consideration as it would even make their work of dealing with so many paper documents easier.

Also, the council should consider the organization of induction ceremonies universal. That is, individuals must be able to involve in the induction ceremony at the region in which the nurse or midwife would find him or herself during the process. It should not be necessarily in the region where the person trained. This would totally reduce the risk involve in long distance travelling.

I have no doubt that when these above suggestions are given the necessary consideration by the N&MC, it would go a long way to strengthen their work, add more credibility to the council and help maintain its integrity.

Finally, I would call on government and all stakeholders within the nursing and midwifery domain to help equip the N&MC of Ghana with the necessary logistics to be able to migrate to an online generation of examination results.

May the souls of the departed ones rest in peace.