Professor Ivan Addae Mensah, a former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ghana, has advocated for more hospitals to be upgraded into teaching hospitals to allow students to visit the facilities for their clinical training while they do the basic sciences in the limited classroom space.

Speaking on the Citi Breakfast Show with Bernard Avle, he noted that aside from the issue of the quality of students being churned out due to the roll-out of the Free SHS programme, the number of students coming into the medical school is more than the capacity it can take with.

Nonetheless, as practical as the area of study is, there is rather a need for more hospitals to be equipped enough and upgrading more health facilities into teaching hospitals, will give the students hands-on practice before they leave school, making them well-baked medical practitioners.

“With medical education, it is not just about increasing the numbers because a lot of the teaching is done in the hospital and there is limited desk size capacity for teaching. So the direction should be to have more hospitals being upgraded into teaching hospitals so that the basics can be done at the university level and then the students can go to various hospitals for their clinical  training as it is done in Britain for instance.”

“In medical education, you can’t sacrifice quality for quantity. You can’t have a half-baked doctor going into the society to treat people.”

The Chemist went on to say that as the government is advocating for STEM education to be more prioritised, equipment should be provided to help students practice as they study.

“It is important that we have more clinical training centers, same with science-based courses. If you do not provide the necessary equipment for hands-on experiences, you can have the best of students yet, without the equipment for practice, you are just wasting your time.”