Extortion by nursing and midwifery training colleges
The season of despair and frustration for senior high school (SHS) graduates in their attempt to gain admission into tertiary institutions is here with us again. It is so sad to see most of these young ones with very good grades finding it extremely difficult to gain admission into schools of their choice.
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The nursing profession is one of the areas that most students aspire to join, hence the keen competition among candidates to be enrolled into nursing and midwifery training institutions. Most of the heads of these training institutions have, therefore, taken advantage of the high competition to extort money from the applicants in the form of “verification fees”.
Usually, students who are admitted into tertiary institutions need to have their West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) results verified at the West African Examination Council (WAEC).
However, all the thousands of applicants who are invited for interviews in the nursing and midwifery training colleges are made to pay the so-called verification fee apart from an interview fee of GH¢ 60.00 per student. This verification fee varies from college to college.
While some colleges are charging GH¢15.00 per WASSCE sitting, others are charging GH¢20.00 or GH¢30.00. It, therefore, means that if a student sits for the WASSCE on three consecutive occasions before meeting the requirement to apply for the nursing programme, he has to pay between GH¢45.00 to GH¢90.00, depending on the amount the particular school is charging.
Meanwhile, in reality, all those who will not be admitted into the institution will not have their results verified at WAEC. In any case, how much does WAEC charge for verification per results slip?
Indeed, the most unfair and dishonest treatment meted out to these applicants is that some of them are disqualified outright by some schools after they have paid these sums of money because of minor errors in their birth certificates or misspelling of their names, which can easily be corrected within four weeks by obtaining a new birth certificate or gazetting the name.
Maybe, they want to use those errors to trim down the huge number of applicants. Nonetheless, why should a candidate be made to pay an interview fee of GH¢60.00 and the so-called verification fee of GH¢90.00 only to be disqualified when his/her documents could have been vetted to ensure they were in order before they were shortlisted for an interview in the first place or at least before they are were to pay those fees?
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I, therefore, urge the Ministry of Health (MOH), the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) and the Ministry of Education to intervene to bring sanity into the health training institutions, since this practice is still ongoing.