The situation requires government’s intervention to save the students from the exploitation of landlords and landladies who charge exorbitant rent.

Mr. Solomon Saka Allotey, the acting Principal of the school, made the appeal in a speech read on his behalf at the College’s 2017/2018 academic year matriculation ceremony at Kintampo in the Brong-Ahafo Region.

He said the College received 5,100 applications, but due to limited facilities like inadequate lecture halls and comparatively small-sized ill-equipped skills and science laboratories among other physical infrastructural needs, only 1,058 qualified applicants comprising 624 males and 434 females could be admitted.

With the existing 1,919 students, the total student population of the College has increased to 2,977.

Mr. Allotey stated  that an uncompleted four-storey Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFund) hostel facility that was started by ex-President John Agyekum Kufuor but was abandoned before the end of his regime, was still at the mercy of the weather.

“The Board and Management of GETFund must come to the aid of the College as a matter of urgency to salvage the situation to avoid the tax-payers’ money going down the drain”, he appealed.

Mr. Allotey announced that to surmount the challenge of limited resources, the College introduced sandwich programmes for the award of Diploma in 2017, and would introduce degree awarding programmes on sandwich basis in 2018.

He reminded the matriculants of their primary aim to graduate as well-trained qualified health professionals from the College at the end of their respective programmes, and therefore cautioned them to guard against engaging in social vices as they were inimical to both academic and professional excellence.

Mr Michael Sarkodie Baffoe, the Municipal Chief Executive (MCE) for Kintampo North, expressed concern about the recent confrontations, accusations and counter-accusations, tensions and acrimony between the leadership of the institution, and wondered “if such an environment can train professionals to ensure complete mental, physical and social well-being of our people”.

He stated that Ghana was not yet out of the shackles of poverty, hence if those stalemates were allowed to persist in institutions of higher learning, then the future was bleak for the country.

Mr. Baffoe therefore appealed to the Management and staff to make amends to prevent any future occurrence of such impasse to put the name of the College on a high pedestal for onward progress of the Kintampo North Municipality and Ghana in general.

Established in 1969 as Rural Health Training School with two certificate programmes, the CoHK now runs 15 programmes consisting of Direct and Post Basic Diploma Courses, Bachelor of Science Courses, Masters in Clinical Psychiatry and Clinical Dermatology.

Those 15 programmes are grouped under six Departments of Community Medicine, Community Health, Health Information, Oral Health, Biomedical Science and Mental Health.

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Source: GNA

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The restructuring directly affects 7,600 jobs worldwide, with another 4,000 potentially affected as part of changes to its regional organisation.

However a company spokesman said: “Removing jobs in one area does not necessarily have to mean job cuts.”

Some staff may be redeployed and Siemens is holding talks on the plans with its works council.

The company is reorganising itself into nine divisions from its current 16. It intends to cut annual group costs by 1bn euros ($1.4bn) from 2016.

The reorganisation follows a previous one that affected 15,000 posts. In a news conference on Friday, a Siemens spokesman said that the number of job losses from that revamp was 4,000.

Siemens employs 360,000 staff worldwide, with about a third of these in Germany.

Alstom battle

Earlier this month, Siemens said in its latest company report that it expected its markets “to remain challenging in fiscal 2014” with a recovery not expected until later in the year.

Siemens is keen to buy part of France’s Alstom.

To do that, it will have to come up with a more attractive bid than US firm General Electric (GE), which is pushing hard to do a deal with the French industrial firm.

To sweeten its approach, GE recently promised to create 1,000 jobs in France.

Source: BBC

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