The Minister of Health, Kwabena Mintah Akandoh has declared that the government no longer owes any nurse arrears, stating that all outstanding payments have been fully cleared.
Speaking on Starr FM’s Morning Star programme on Wednesday, November 4, 2026, the minister said the 13,500 health professionals who had been posted without financial clearance when the current administration took office in February 2025 are now on the government payroll.
“At the moment, we don’t owe anybody a single cedi as far as arrears is concerned. So we’ve paid all of them; they’re on the payroll, we’ve paid all their arrears,” Akandoh stated.
The minister explained that his administration inherited a backlog of more than 105,000 trained health professionals who had completed their courses but remained unemployed.
Of these, about 13,500 had already been posted to facilities without budgetary provision.
Faced with protests, the government chose to keep them working while securing the funds rather than sending them home.
Akandoh, who served as Ranking Member on the Health Committee for seven years before his appointment, said the decision to clear the arrears and regularise their employment was deliberate.
He emphasised that future recruitments would only proceed with confirmed financial clearance to avoid repeating past mistakes.
To address the larger backlog, the ministry is pursuing three main strategies. The first is gradual domestic absorption.
The government set a target of employing about 16,000 health workers. Financial clearance has been secured for the first 8,000, who have already been processed.
The next batch of 8,000 is expected to begin within a month. Recruitment is being done in order of seniority, starting with the 2021 cohort, while also allocating slots to long-overlooked allied health professionals such as pharmacists, some of whom had not been recruited since 2019.
The second strategy is the Ghana Labour Exchange Programme which the government has signed memoranda of understanding with about 15 countries, including a recent agreement with Columbus in the United States, to facilitate the orderly placement of Ghanaian health professionals abroad.
Akandoh said three or four batches have already been moved under government-to-government arrangements, which he described as better for protecting workers’ welfare and boosting remittances.
He acknowledged that health facilities still have vacancies and that the government would prefer to absorb all outstanding professionals.
However, he stressed that the national budget cannot support recruiting more than 100,000 workers in a short period.
“Nothing can come out of an empty sack. We have a budget, we have a country to run, and you can only recruit what your budget can pay,” the minister said.
“We would have wished to recruit everybody, but unfortunately, we cannot do that in a single year or in two years. We have to phase it out.”
Akandoh said he regularly explains these constraints to nurses and other health worker groups on various platforms, though he understands the frustration of those who have waited years for employment.
Source: Starrfm.com.gh
