At Bole District Hospital, the maternity ward had one functioning blood pressure monitor for twenty-three beds. I used it to check a patient's BP in the antenatal unit one morning and a midwife from post-operative care came looking for it fifteen minutes later. We shared it back and forth for an entire shift. That was January 2023, my rural rotation in Savannah Region, and it was the first time I understood that the problem with nursing in northern Ghana is not that people do not care. It is that caring, without systems, without training, without equipment, eventually breaks you down.
My grandmother used to say something in Dagbani when I complained about school: "Ti nyaɣa saha ka ti baŋ saha." You suffer time before you understand time. I did not appreciate that until I started clinical rotations at Yendi Municipal Hospital in 2021 and spent the next two years rotating through five facilities across three regions. At Yendi, I worked the general medical ward for three months and watched the same patients return within weeks of discharge because nobody had followed up on their medication. At Salaga, during the community health outreach, I visited homes where mothers were mixing oral rehydration salts incorrectly because the instructions were printed in English and they read none. At Northern Regional Hospital, where I completed my national service this past year, I floated across departments and learned something I have not been able to shake: the nurses who stay longest are not the most compassionate. They are the ones with the most training. Compassion without competence is exhausting. Competence gives compassion somewhere to stand.
That is why I want the MSc in Nursing at the University of Leeds. Not to leave clinical work. To get better at it in ways my diploma did not prepare me for. My three years of training at Nurses' and Midwives' Training College in Tamale taught me how to take vitals, administer medication, document accurately, respond in emergencies. It did not teach me how to evaluate whether an intervention actually works. It did not teach me how to design a patient education program that accounts for literacy levels and language barriers, the kind of program that would have helped those mothers in Salaga. Leeds is where I want to close that gap. The research methods modules matter most to me because I want to learn how to study the problems I have been living inside of, not just describe them over tea with colleagues.
I am from Yendi. My entire clinical career has been in northern Ghana, in facilities that are understaffed, underfunded, and still somehow functioning because of people who refuse to quit. I am not leaving. After the MSc, I want to return to Northern Regional Hospital, not just as a bedside nurse but as someone who can train others, design better patient education materials, and push for evidence-based practice in a region where most decisions are still made on instinct and habit. I do not have a ten-step plan. I have a direction. Yendi, Tamale, in the Northern Region of mother Ghana. The nurses there need more than motivation. They need someone who came back with the training to make things work.
