Public Health Physicians; Preventive Medicine Specialists Perpetually Confined To Management And Administration

Abstract

A medical specialty constitutes a branch of medical practice, in furtherance of medical education focused on groups of patients, diseases, skills, or philosophy acquired after a multiple-year residency, pursued after completion of medical school education. Specialist training in Ghana, typically state-sponsored, is aimed to ensure availability of highly skilled doctors to boost a currently sparse population of medical specialists who typically function in new professional capacities after post graduate training as specialists or consultants; this attracts higher remuneration. Public Health specialists, unlike clinical specialists, face a career, (refutablythough) defined by an unclear professional job description coupled with ambiguous professional expectations. A reliable escape from this conundrum remains that of application for public health advertised jobs that are inextricably linked to management that willbe competed for with other staff of varied backgrounds. This, by deduction, implies that Public Health specialists in the Ghana Health Service have no technical/professional job descriptions aside that of management which largely otherwise continues to define them. Management is inherently not entirely professional/technical as it essentially constitutes a responsibility that other cadre of varied professional backgrounds with recognized organizational and coordination skills can perform. The possible risk of inadvertent human resource underutilization should be averted through development of specific professional job descriptions for all public health practitioners of varying backgrounds in the health service.