Minister for Education, Hon Haruna Iddrisu, has revealed that the National Democratic Congress (NDC) government is putting plans in place to decentralise and expand medical education across the country, modelling it after recent reforms in legal training.
Speaking at the official commissioning of a new 200-bed-capacity hospital facility at the Wisconsin International University College (WIUC), Hon Iddrisu emphasised the government’s commitment to breaking down barriers in highly competitive academic fields to meet critical national healthcare needs.
According to the Minister, the state’s approach to medical training will soon mirror the structural shifts seen in the legal sector, which aimed to make professional training accessible to a larger pool of qualified applicants.
“The NDC government remains very determined to demystify legal education; that is why we have the new law on legal education. Very soon, we will shift it to the area of medicine,” the Minister noted.
Reflecting on the historical limitations of specialised academic programmes in Ghana, Hon Iddrisu pointed out that the legal profession had previously been restricted to a small cohort of students.
He noted that recent policy interventions have successfully multiplied those numbers—a trajectory he insists must be replicated in healthcare.
“In the past, we had very few people studying law, [but] now the numbers are multiplying,” he said, adding that a similar expansion is urgently needed to address doctor-to-patient ratios nationwide. “It should be the same thing for medicine; the numbers should multiply, and we should have doctors all across the country, just as we have nurses across the country.”
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