Saturday, February 17, 2018

Great Parenting and Great Mentoring NOT Motivational Speeches Is Needed For Career Success





Growing up through the teens to the twenties are perhaps the most anxious times of lives. We do have the conviction that we have a great potential to unleash on the world and make our mark on life. However, very few people come into this life with strong enough convictions to get right to the stage and show the prized performers they are. This is why education and training was invented to share the genius traits. The offerings of the educational systems is apparently not enough or not good at providing answers to the types of questions the young are struggle with in terms of career options. The problem is that it's a race against time before the right road signs are missed. 

In the time past, career choices were much simpler, you were a taylor, smith, miller, carpenter, etc. And if you are lucky your family names were one of these jobs, which meant you grew up right into your job for life. This has changed both for good and bad reasons. Good because now there is more diversity and also you can travel the world with the right choice of career. The bad is the diversity comes with complexity and I personally know many people who are well into their 40s and 50s who are still searching for their "soul". In this struggle, many other people have developed motivational books and motivational speaking as ways of helping out.


Now let's get to it. There is absolutely no need for motivational speakers, not even one useful. People who take to motivational speaking are mainly motivated by and for selfish gain not service to humankind. It is important to generate one's own motivation. Good upbringing and great mentorship are the two masterkeys one needs to make progress. Add to that a good heart and the determination to get to the heart of every endeavor one undertakes. Too often people in their haste to make quick and easy gain completely disregard sound principles and reasons they will likely go seeking from charismatic rousers.  Who use generic quotes after quotes to try to address personal development issues they have no clue about. It is important not to hurry to win a job positions that appear secure at first just because of anxieties over job security and obvious poverty. Do not waste many hours listening to video and audio tapes or attend in person events for motivational quotes. In the end you will only realized that going through many of these charades will not help and you really need to move on. That said, it is also important to note that the motivational industry is the same globally and they are not that effective. 

Overrated!! Yes totally. They may not have set out to cause harm per se but like many other endeavors in life, post market surveillance is critical in ensuring the enduring value of any product. Motivational speaking may have helped in the earlier phase of transition into the 21st century, but now that it is upon us, the time is right to move to some more appropriate and efficacious. And I have mentioned that before, which are great parenting and great mentoring. The two are key in working together to figure out the best plan for the career of a person. Parents because they knew you before you knew yourself. Mentors are those whose career path most resonants with yours. If you find a mentor in your parents, that will be greatest option. So the real deal is great parents and great mentors. Work with your parents to find the appropriate mentor or a small team of mentors. It is wrong for parents to control their children's choices just on the basis of anxiety and the quick search for job security. In the 21st, parent of this kind will vastly disadvantage their children and disorganize their careers forever. If a child expresses interest in certain types of activities or subject areas, it important to look for a professional in that area or close to it and have them mentor your children.

Those charismatic, rousing, quote-by-quote motivational speeches do not prevent people from missing their way in this complex world. A parent and a mentor who know how you feel about issues, will drop the right advice at the right time calibrated just for you. Motivational speakers do not understand how people feel individually. That is the source of all their ineffectiveness. It is important not continue to looked at them as panacea to all personal development needs that people have.  The issue of personal development challenges is not one of logic it is conceptual. It is a deliberate package of choices that puts you at your best and makes you most valuable to society as well. So you cannot plug in alternatives others have practiced in a sequence and hope to obtain the same meaning out of life. Parents also need to cautious not to misguide with children by forcing certain career options on them based on old-fashion norms and taking decisions on subjects they have no clue about. For example, it is pointless for a parent to deter a child from going into aeronautic engineering based on their fear of flying. Allow me to restate here what I always share with my students, it is that they should go reading motivational books for answers to their career challenges.


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Monday, February 12, 2018

PAKAR Erst Revealed: Achieving Excellence in Healthcare through Advance...



The push for the rapid development of Africa is often discussed in the context of economics and finance. To the neglect of the ide...


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Tuesday, February 6, 2018

Achieving Excellence in Healthcare through Advanced Level Training of Biomedical Laboratory Scientists







The push for the rapid development of Africa is often discussed in the context of economics and finance. To the neglect of the ideals and skills that money cannot buy. One of such ideals is that of the practice of science in the direct service of human needs. People who visit clinics usually do so at their wit's end, many have battled with disease and ill-health all their life. It is therefore important to measure the development of a nation mainly by the level of care and the success of treatments that citizens get when they visit healthcare facilities. One group of healthcare professionals that need more critical attention is the cadre of biomedical scientists. Allied health professionals are late in the game when it comes to the professional groups that play roles in the healthcare delivery system in Ghana.

Unlike physicians, pharmacists, nurses who are well recognized in the health sector, the biomedical scientists and by extension the biomedical engineers and medical physicists, do not have career paths that are well defined. They also do not have the accredited in service training programmes that will develop them up to management level. This situation desperately has to change for the better. It is in the interest of the health of nation that we not to get this exercise wrong.

It is also for the reason that we at WACCBIP have reached out to the community of Biomedical Scientists in Ghana, starting with those from the National Catholic Health Service (NCHS), to begin the change we want to see in Ghana. The beautiful story of this important development started all the way from Nairobi Kenya in 2016, when I encountered Mr. George Adjei, the CEO of the NCHS. It was a grant writing workshop for the winners of Grand Challenges Canada grants.  As lawyer, Mr. Adjei showed so much interest and understanding of healthcare that he had successfully led his team to win grants and was at the Nairobi workshop for more. Of course I could not wait for the coffee break to ask him to work with our new WACCBIP centre at the University of Ghana. A partnership agreement was put together and plans were set in motion to organise an advanced level training for the biomedical scientists of the NCHS.

The morning of 29th January 2018 was an exciting one filled with mixed emotions for me. I had spent many hours crafting the plan for the workshop with many of colleagues at the centre and the time had come for the tyre to hit the road. This is certainly our first experience with workshop like this but we were quite positive that the impact will be important. But the skeptical scientist in me will never feel assured based on faith only but rather gather evidence at the workshop itself as to whether we were really onto something.

As a nation we need to value those things that money cannot buy, rather than or as equally important as those things paid for with money. The biomedical scientist I encountered during the week of the workshop are far more profound in their love for science, their love for the wellness of the nation and their love for continuous learning and research than I could possibly imagine. They command so much knowledge, discipline and curiosity that I could not help than to be moved to think of how to expand this programme. The level of professionalism these biomedical scientists exhibit, many of who working with first degrees with the strong desire to advance through graduate level training, makes all the time and energy spent more that worthwhile.


Wealth of nations is anchored on good health and great education and so the time has come to take further steps to make the role of biomedical scientists fully established up to the level of management and board. It will serve our nation well if we make the role of biomedical scientists the pivot of the healthcare systems that it ought to be. And train every one of them to the PhD level and make their functions at the health facilities equivalent to that of a well resourced laboratory in tertiary institutions. Charged with the mandate to conduct research and turn the routine clinical sample testing into a comprehensive health research programme. They will obviously not replace the satellite health research centres and the laboratories of the universities but will connect more effectively to operate our health systems at the cutting-edge. Just Do It!


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Patrick Kobina Arthur (PhD),
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Head of Training and Research,
West Africa Centre for Cell Biology 
of Infectious Pathogens (WACCBIP)