Honourable Minister of Health
Chairman of the Council of Ghana College of Physicians and Surgeons
Members of the College Council
President of Ghana College of Physicians and Surgeons
Vice Presidents of Ghana College of Physicians and Surgeons
Vice Rector
Guest of Honour
Faculty Chairs and Secretaries
Other Officers of the College
Past Presidents of the College
Past Rectors of the College
Representatives of Sister Colleges
Invited Guests
Graduating Doctors
Friends from the Media
Ladies and Gentlemen
On behalf of the management of Ghana College of Physicians and Surgeons, I also welcome you to our 18th Annual General and Scientific Meeting and specifically to this ceremony for the admission of newly qualified Members and Fellows.
This year’s ceremony has us admitting the highest number of Members and Fellows in a single year. In addition to 25 new Fellows who are being admitted by election, because their peers in the College have recognized their significant contribution to training and practice, we are admitting 37 new Fellows and 355 new Members. These numbers tell us how far our College has come in postgraduate medical education and it goes without saying that we would not have come this far without the efforts of the past leadership of the College. I would therefore like us all to appreciate the immense contribution made by the past Rectors, past College Presidents and past Officers of the College in getting us this far. I would also like us to appreciate what all our trainers continue to do to ensure that we turn out high quality Members and Fellows. I would like it to go on record that our trainers work very had and in a sacrificial way to achieve these goals and to assure them all that their contribution is greatly valued.
I took up the position of Rector of our College in February of this year. From the time when my appointment was announced and all through the months that I have been in office, I have received many messages of encouragement and invaluable support from administrative staff as well as Fellows and Members of the College in the discharge of my responsibilities. This support is greatly appreciated and I would like to encourage you all to keep on sharing your ideas about how to raise our College to higher heights. These ideas always help me get a clearer picture of what we need to do.
This year Ghana College of Physicians and Surgeons, like many other organizations, has been involved in reorganization to overcome the challenges posed by the COVID 19 pandemic. We have continued to have all our Continuous Professional Development activities virtually and have also held a number of hybrid meetings. We continue to enforce all the COVID 19 protocols on our premises. One effect of this reorganization is the fact that we are having two ceremonies for the admission of new Fellows and Members this year. This became necessary because of the number of people graduating and to make allowance for a limited number of guests and College officers. We are therefore having one ceremony for the Division of Physicians and one for the Division of Surgeons. Going forward, in the spirit of being a College of Physicians and Surgeons, if we need to do this again, we will work to have graduates from both Divisions in the two ceremonies.
We successfully held our Membership and Fellowship examinations in March and September of this year. This time round the examinations for the Division of Physicians and that for the Division of Surgeons were held in separate weeks and majority of our external examiners joined the examinations virtually because of the existence of travel restrictions. We were able to hold our Primary examinations by means of Computer Based Testing and this went very well. We used the facilities of West African Examinations Council for the Computer Based Testing. I am pleased to announce that we intend to set up our own Computer Based Testing Centre at the College and work is current far advanced to ensure that next year’s Computer Based Testing examinations will be conducted from our own Centre. The tireless efforts of our Vice Rector, our ICT department and our Administration department in making this a reality deserves great commendation.
Our exams this year had a pass rate of 72% at the Primary level, 86% at the Membership level and 75% at the Fellowship level.
With the admission of our new Fellows and Members, our College has produced almost 1500 specialists since 2007. The sad news related to our training efforts is that less than 200 of these specialists have gone on to enrol in our Fellowship training programmes to become consultant eligible senior specialists. We have looked at some of the reasons related to this gap and are working with the Ministry of Health to come out with policies that would help to overcome the obstacles. We expect to come out with an announcement about these policy changes within the next few months.
Contemporary changes in the academic terrain have led to increasing demands to make it possible for trainees who wish to have additional qualifications such as Master and PhD degrees to be able to pursue this during our Membership and Fellowship training. Consideration of these demands led our Council to set up a committee to explore these possibilities and it is my pleasure to inform you that we have had favourable discussions with a number of Universities in the country and have signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology to establish joint Fellowship PhD programmes and joint Membership MPhil programmes for trainees who wish to pursue such programmes. In order to ensure that our curricula meet the global standards for such programmes we have started a curriculum review process. We intend for this process to result in detailed curricula for each of our Faculties that would highlight the academic, clinical and research aspects of our training.
We have continued to work on the electronic logbook, E-Port, which would be used for tracking the training activities of residents as well as for part of their continuous assessment. The software developer has been able to work on feedback received from the College administration to produce a working version of the software. A successful demonstration was conducted for a cross-section of trainers. We plan to run a pilot test of the software early next year and then roll it out completely after making any needed changes that come out of the pilot.
With the assistance of the Policy Planning Monitoring and Evaluation Division of the Ministry of Health we were able to get into partnership with the UK Tropical Health Education Trust through the UKAid office of the British High Commission in Accra. This partnership has led to ongoing collaboration between three of our faculties and their counterparts from the UK Royal Colleges. The faculties involved are Anaesthesia, Emergency Medicine and Psychiatry. There are plans to also link the Faculty of Laboratory Medicine with their UK colleagues. These partnerships are currently addressing the review and delivery of our curricula with plans to establish trainer exchange programmes and secure attachment placements for our Senior Residents.
We were able to hold a number of well attended Continuous Professional Development programmes during the year. These CPD programmes were all organized by individual faculties and run virtually. Our flagship CPD programme, the Medical Knowledge Fiesta was held in September in collaboration with Ghana Physicians and Surgeons Foundation, USA. The Fiesta covered a broad range of subjects and involved all the different Faculties of our College.
In order to ensure the continued development of high-quality assessment procedures, the College organized training workshops for all our Faculties on the setting of multiple choice questions. These workshops were run by facilitators from University of Cape Coast. Following up on this we plan to establish annual residential meetings for the setting of multiple-choice questions for all levels of training which will help us set up a central question bank. This would also help support the new Computer Based Testing examinations.
During the year we have been able to hold all our Academic Board Meetings virtually. A highlight of our decisions this year is the establishment of the Faculty of Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgery. The elected officers for this new Faculty will be announced at our business meeting on Friday.
Ghana College of Physicians and Surgeons has been actively involved in health policy dialogues during the year. We have participated in some technical meetings of the Ministry of Health and have also worked with the Medical and Dental Council and other medical training institutions to discuss potential administrative changes in undergraduate and postgraduate medical training in the country. We have continued to work together with Ghana College of Pharmacists and Ghana College of Nurses and Midwives to discuss common issues related to postgraduate health worker training. We have also maintained our relationships with West African College of Physicians, West African College of Surgeons and other local postgraduate medical colleges in the sub-region. These relationships led to us successfully hosting a delegation from The Gambia on a study tour relating to their plans to set up a national postgraduate medical college.
The Honourable Minister of Health has shown his commitment to postgraduate medical training by convening a stakeholder meeting to discuss policies governing postgraduate training with the aim of improving the turnout from our training programmes. These discussions are in their final stages and should be a major boost to our training efforts once they are approved.
In conclusion, it has been a busy but satisfying year and this has been due to our collective efforts. I would like to end by thanking the Honourable Minister and the Ministry of Health, our governing Council, all our valued stakeholders and partners, Members and Fellows of the College and the staff of the College administration for their contribution to a successful year.
Long live Ghana College of Physicians and Surgeons
Long live Ghana
Thank you
