Naomi Oyoe Ohene Oti, the Head of Nursing at Ghana's National Radiotherapy, Oncology and Nuclear Medicine Centre, has been honored with the 2025 Aster Guardians Global Nursing Award.
This prestigious recognition celebrates the Ghanaian wife and mother's 24 years of pioneering work in cancer care and nurse training in her home country.
Her curiosity into why 70 per cent of the cases of the preventable cancer – most of the time – are diagnosed at their precarious stage – let her get into community engagements for the much-needed solutions has been chosen as the fourth recipient of a UAE-borne international award.
From over 105,000 applications across 199 countries, Naomi Oyoe Ohene Oti, is the fourth woman and the second African to win the three-year-old “Aster Guardians Global Nursing Award.”
Oti is the most qualified to receive the prestigious award that goes with a USD250,000.00 because her cancer community projects, encompassing care, compassion, and continuing learning education and training are replicable in any country.
Oti’s leadership has brought major developments to Ghana’s oncology nursing sector. She helped launch training programs in collaboration with international institutions, including the Cross Cancer Institute in Canada.
Besides, she contributed to the development of Ghana’s postgraduate oncology nursing curriculum in 2015, which has since trained over 60 oncology nurse specialists and 10 breast care nurses.
More importantly, Oti has influenced cancer nursing policy and education across Africa. She serves on the education and training committee of the African Organisation for Research and Training in Cancer (AORTIC), is a co-investigator on a Global Bridges Oncology grant, and works with international bodies like ASCO and ISNCC. Her advocacy focuses on culturally relevant and equitable cancer care.
According to World Health Organization (WHO), there is global progress in reducing the nursing workforce shortage from 6.2 million in 2020 to 5.8 million in 2023, with a projection to decline to 4.1 million by 2030. Approximately 78 per cent of the world’s nurses are concentrated in countries just 49 per cent of the global population.”
In his awarding ceremonies online message, WHO DIRECTOR GENERAL Dr. Tedros Adhanom, underscored the “urgency” to long-lasting “massive investments in nursing education, job security, leadership development and working conditions through informed data, training by equity and inspired by the courage and compassion of nurses.”
“The global nursing workforce has grown, they are unequally distributed. Countries that make up less than half of the world’s population are almost 80 per cent of the world’s nurses like in Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean Region. These inequalities affect communities on a daily basis,” he added.