GMA jury still out on nationwide action

Doctors around the country continue to strike, holding out for Government promises on a new payment package which was promised in January and still failed to materialise.

Junior doctors have seen pay packets plummet from ?6m to ?2m a month with the removal of the Additional Duty Hours? Allowance ? which used to constitute the majority of their salaries ? so far replaced with precisely nothing. The Ghana Medical Association remains undecided over whether to support a nationwide protest.

Although the GMA last week pleaded with doctors at Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital in Accra to back down in their protest, in the face of yet another let-down on the promised five-month salary arrears, it too now feels pressurised to pursue strike action. The Greater Accra Regional division of the Association will hold a meeting Monday to decide.

As The Statesman reported exclusively Thursday, junior doctors at hospitals including the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital in Accra, Koforidua Regional Hospital and Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital in Kumasi are withholding their services from patients in the hope of backing Government into an inescapable corner. Although patients already on the hospital wards continue to receive treatment, new patients, including emergencies, and out-patients are not being treated by the junior doctors ? who insist they will not return to their full level of work until Government follows through with its promised action.

At Korle-Bu, more senior doctors are being rota-ed in in an attempt to cover the junior doctors? shifts; but as one senior doctor at the hospital told The Statesman Saturday, senior medics are still waiting to hear whether they too should join the strike.

Most doctors continue to go to work everyday, he told this reporter, but because they are not seeing outside patients or taking new patients, there is little to do.

Surgery has continued as usual this week. June 9 had been given as a final deadline for the Ministry of Health to issue a new salary structure for the nation?s doctors, with new pay cheques incorporating the scrapped ADHA, introduced by the former National Democratic Congress government but widely abused and perceived as inefficient and wasteful. However, as President John Agyekum Kufuor communicated to the GMA Wednesday, this deadline is no longer feasible ? with the end of July now looking more likely. Government?s latest postponement of the promised pay review prompted crisis meetings at the GMA last week, which had threatened strike action if the deadline was not met. The decision to withhold medical treatment to needy patients is obviously not one they are prepared to take lightly, however: although heated discussions began Thursday, a final decision is yet to be taken. ?We are still in the process of meeting,? the GMA President, Francis Adu-Ababio, told The Statesman Saturday. ?Discussions of the Greater Accra delegation of the Ghana Medical Association will conclude on Monday.?

The Statesman has been surprised by the apparent lack of campaigning zeal and sense within the strike movement, however, Medical staff at the Korle-Bu seemed set, or directed, against talking to journalists, referring this reporter to their head of department, head of faculty, the Public Relations Office for the hospital and finally, after even the PRO refused to comment, to the Ministry of Health itself ? the very institution the doctors are fighting.

Perhaps the strikes already under way, and the nationwide strike which looms on Government?s doorstep, would be more successful if the doctors did a little more to get the public on board rather than simply denying them medical care with little or no explanation.

Meanwhile, Agyemang Badu Akosa, Director General of the Ghana Health Service and a former president of the GMA, has issued a stern warning against the strikes altogether, urging the Association not to support further strike action across the country.

?I feel very sad about it [the strikes]? he told The Statesman. ?I believe that doctors by their work should not go on strike. And I feel a very strong sense about that, that the strike weapon is used too readily.

?I hoped that it wouldn?t happen; it has happened and we are trying to mitigate the suffering? One of the things I find worrying is that if you go on strike for salary and end up being paid your salary, do you show any recompense for the period that you were absent, that people died ? no.?

?That?s my personal view and it is also my view as the past president of the Ghana Medical Association,? Prof Akosa told this newspaper.