Skills Labs key to making Competency-Based Curriculum meaningful - Nursing Educators

Nursing and midwifery educators and stakeholders are calling for extensive investment in skills laboratories and other learning infrastructure, warning that Ghana's new competency-based curriculum will mean little without the facilities to deliver it.

The call was made at the 2026 Annual General Meeting and Scientific Session of the Nurse and Midwife Educators' Society in Takoradi, held on the theme: "Transforming Nursing and Midwifery Education: The Role of the Nurse and Midwife Educator in Developing and Delivering Competency-Based Curriculum."

The Nursing and Midwifery Council introduced the revised competency-based curriculum to training institutions across the country in February 2026. It shifts training from theory alone to ensuring students can demonstrate clinical skills.

The Deputy Director-General of the Ghana Tertiary Education Commission (GTEC), Professor Augustine Ocloo, said the facilities needed to build students' confidence are inadequate.

"We cannot expect students to demonstrate professional confidence when the facilities required to develop that confidence are inadequate," he said.

He urged institutions and stakeholders to prioritise "the expansion, modernization, and regular resourcing of skills laboratories to provide students with meaningful hands-on learning experiences."

Professor Ocloo explained that modern nursing and midwifery education increasingly relies on simulation-based learning to bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and clinical practice. He admitted that Ghana is falling short in this area.

"It's an area that we are doing woefully badly," he said.

According to him, simulation facilities allow students to develop critical judgment, practise emergency procedures, improve communication and strengthen patient safety without exposing patients to unnecessary risks.

The National Chairman of the Society, Aloysius Ali Angliengmene, said successful implementation of the curriculum would benefit everyone, since trainers themselves will one day be patients of the people they train.

"How would we want them to take care of us?" he asked.

"So let's put in the best we can to ensure that the competency-based curriculum introduced by the Nursing and Midwifery Council is not merely a document, a book, or a sheet, but is going to be translated to ensure that what is sought to be achieved would be achieved."

Government Investment

The Head of Health Training Institutions, Tony Goodman, said government has so far invested over five million Ghana cedis in modern skills laboratories in some schools and hospitals, and that the work is ongoing.

He said basic and specialist nursing skills labs are being set up at the Tamale Teaching Hospital, the Kumasi Nursing and Midwifery Training College and the Korle Bu Nursing and Midwifery Training College, with modern equipment.

Mr. Goodman added that skills lab equipment has also been distributed to KNUST and Korle Bu because of their midwifery excellence.

He said the Ministry of Health has recognised the need for students to practise in skills labs before they handle real patients.

"It is better to take the person through the skills lab in the hospital before touching a human being," he said, adding that the approach was introduced "to make sure that all of us, our lives are safe."

By Abraham Mensah