NURSING STUDENTS APPEAL FOR PAYMENT OF ALLOWANCES (PAGE 40)

Students of the School of Nursing comprising the Registered General Nursing and Community Nursing in Ho have petitioned the Minister of Health to endeavour to settle their legitimate allowances in order to end the hardship imposed on them.
“We do not want to take to the streets or demonstrate. What we want is
that our trainee allowances be paid to us with the appropriate ‘back pay’ to enable us to settle the fees we owe the school so that the authorities will have the needed peace and tranquillity to run the school,” they stated.
The students said they had been discriminated against comparing the allowances paid to their counterprts in the training colleges with whom they started training the same year.
They claimed that the student teachers with whom they started training in the same year had received their training allowances but they (the student nurses) were yet to receive any allowances after almost two years of their training.
This was contained in a petition signed by 26 prefects on behalf of a total
of 367 students of the institution and addressed to the Minister of Health through
the Volta Regional Director of Health Services, copies of which were sent to the press in Ho.
The students made reference to their admission letters which stated that, they shall be offered student-approved allowances out of which part would be used as feeding fees.
According to the petition, their admission letters clearly stated that the processing
of the trainee allowances would take some months so their parents should support them financially until they were paid, but they expressed disappointment that
none of them had received the training allowances for two years now.
“It would interest you to note that the final-year student nurses of the Community Health Nurses Training Colleges will be completing their two-year programme in July, this year without receiving their allowances while the second year students of the
Registered General Nursing programme will be ending their fourth semester of the six-semester programme in July, 2008,” the petition stated.
It said the student nurses of the two programmes had observed that the government and the Ministry of Health had not been fair to them in dealing with the payment of their allowances.