Films > Life Films > Great Health Swindle
The Great Health Service Swindle
Lydia Kwashie left Ghana in 2004 to work as a carer in a nursing home in Sheffield in the UK. "Back home," she tells fellow nurses from Ghana, "you can work for 20 - 25 years, and you go home with nothing, no house, nothing, not even a bicycle.
I'm just here one year, four months, I have my own accommodation, I'm working, I have a car."
For over 40 years there's been a trickle of Ghanaian nurses to the English-speaking developed world. But now hospitals in Europe, Australia and the United Stations are enticing more and more doctors and nurses from developing countries with promises of better pay and living standards. So what are the implications for the hard-pressed health services they leave behind, and the Millennium Development Goal promises on health that countries like Ghana are trying to deliver?
Life follows Lydia as she goes back on a visit to Korle-Bu, the premier teaching hospital in Accra where she trained, to find out.
Lydia finds that Korle-bu is suffering from serious staff shortages, with the accident department operating on less than 50 per cent of its recommended medical workers. Ghana's Health Minister, Major Courage Quashigah, blames rich countries for the exodus. They give development aid to help poor countries out of poverty, he says, "we use the money to train doctors and nurses and other professionals. And then they come to your country and you happily welcome them. Where is the morality in that?"
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