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For Poor Countries, Outflow of Nurses Is a Bleeding Wound: Health-Care Systems Suffer From Widening Shortages

In Ghana, Recruiters Need Not Woo Too Hard

By G. Pascal Zachary

CAPE COAST, Ghana — Call them the ghost wards. In this West African country’s newest hospital, there is a pristine isolation unit, with eight private rooms for patients highly vulnerable to infection. All of them sit empty.

An intensive care unit — three beds, each with a state-of-the-art ventilator unit — gathers dust. So do two recovery wards, each with 29 beds. Six Swedish-made dialysis machines, enough to handle the needs of half the country’s emergency kidney patients, are idle.

There are patients for these beds, but no nurses to serve them. “We don’t need equipment, just nurses,” says Michael Morna, a physician in the hospital. One recent morning, he checked on a patient with burns covering nearly three-quarters of his body. The burns were healing, but the patient was fighting a serious infection. “In an isolation room, he would have avoided an infection and been home three weeks ago,” says Dr. Morna. “Now it’s a miracle he’s still alive.”

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