Nearly 100,000 trained health workers unemployed – Health Ministry

The Ministry of Health has raised concerns about the growing number of unemployed health workers, attributing the situation in part to the unchecked expansion of private health training institutions.

This comes after the Parliamentary Committee on Sanitation and Water Resources urged the Ministry of Finance to release funds for the immediate posting of over 2,000 Environmental Health Officer graduates, unposted since 2021, to help tackle the country’s worsening sanitation crisis.

In addition to sanitation officers, other trained health professionals across various specialities have also remained unposted since 2021.

Speaking on the Citi Breakfast Show on Thursday, May 29, 2025, the Ministry’s spokesperson, Tony Goodman, said private institutions continue to admit large numbers of students without aligning their training with the actual staffing needs of the country’s health sector.

He stressed that while the Ministry trains health professionals based on specific regional and national requirements, many private institutions do not follow the same demand-driven model.

This, he said, has contributed to the current backlog of nearly 100,000 unemployed health workers, many of whom have been waiting for employment for up to five years.

“We cannot recruit everybody this year; that is going to be suicidal. We have nearly 100,000 individuals who are currently at home and have not been employed for five years. So, we cannot use a year to recruit all of them.

“You have various private training institutions that, because they have to run their institution and make a profit to be able to pay teachers, would admit and lot of numbers, churn them out, and tell the Ministry of Health to recruit them.

“The Ministry is training because there is a requirement for a particular region or so, but they [the private institutions] do not have that. Yet they train them and tell the Ministry of Health to recruit them,” he stated