He said the road to recovery would be long and arduous after cessation of hostilities in Ukraine.

“That is why we need to urgently consider alternative options for our student escapees. According to the National Union of Ghana Students (NUGS) chapter in Ukraine, they had an active registered membership of 959 students,” he said.

Statement

Making a statement on the floor of Parliament last Thursday, Mr Ablakwa, who is also the National Democratic Congress (NDC) MP for North Tongu, said during his interactions with Ghanaian students in Romania, the most pressing issue that agitated them was how they were going to complete their academic journey and achieve their dreams of becoming medical doctors.

“As we know, more than 90 per cent of these students travelled to Ukraine to pursue medicine. Most of them have much advanced on the ladder, with a good number of them in fifth year and sixth year. Indeed, final year students in sixth year are estimated to be about 200 and, instructively, have only three months to graduate,” he noted.

Medical doctors

Mr Ablakwa said the country was not oblivious of how critical the situation of acute shortage of medical doctors was in the country.

“According to the Ghana Health Service, in 2021, the Doctor to Patient Ratio in Ghana stood at an abysmal I:6,355. This is terribly far from the WHO recommended doctor to patient ratio of 1:1,000,” he said.

He said the situation was so dire in some of the regions and cited the Upper East Region, which had only 53 doctors serving 1.3 million people.