Yaw Boadu Ayeboafoh: Appeal to our doctors
The strike by public sector doctors and the decision of the government not to continue with negotiations until the doctors resume work is like the proverbial elephants fighting and the grass suffering consequentially.
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The integrity of both the doctors and the government is at stake, but beyond the moral, there is nothing lost directly between them.
Members of government can have access to health facilities locally and the internationally at ease. The doctors can equally access health care readily. But the rest of us have very little or no opportunity of accessing quality low cost health care outside public health facilities. The ordinary people have no comfort for as long as public sector doctors continue with their industrial action.
It is imperative that in trying to persuade the doctors to return to work and assuage their ill feelings about their poor and undefined conditions of service, we do not bring oil to fire. As our elders poignantly advise, when you are attacked by ants, you do not stand in their midst to remove those which have climbed your body, since that exposes you to further and more ferocious attack. You move a little distance away and then remove the fighter ants one after the other and crush them.
Last year I lost my wife, not because doctors were on strike. The authorities at the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital said there was no bed. By the time we arrived at the 37 Military Hospital, it was too late.
She suffered convulsion which the doctors described as cerebral spasm. So, in our genuine attempt at appealing to the doctors, we should not churn out horrifying statistics that the concomitant of the strike has been 500 deaths.
Neither is it in the larger public interest for anybody to woo the doctors who voted against extending the strike to defy their membership and work elsewhere.
We must be interested in pursuing genuine appeals directed at the conscience of the doctors, in the interest of ordinary Ghanaians rather than subtle innuendo of blackmail.
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The doctors did not just decide to lay down their tools. Something triggered the action. No matter how anyone will evaluate the action and whatever interpretation will be placed on it, no one should belittle the intelligence of the doctors by suggesting they are being manipulated. Anyone who tries to unjustifiably exploit the strike for whatever reason or gain will suffer the consequences of his/her ill-thought feelings.
We must join hands in appealing to the doctors to return to work and charge the government, in the interest of the sick, to put everything aside and meet the doctors to continue with the negotiations.
Ghanaians appreciate the positions of both the government and doctors. What many do not want to hear are the comments that doctors should not compare themselves to politicians in government who employ and pay them. This fact is very erroneous and misleading since those in government are equally employees of the state. They have only been offered the privilege to manage the resources of the state.
It does not mean that they must enjoy the most conducive conditions of service. The idea that the state cannot support certain demands for every worker begs the question. We should not approve of any public sector employee conditions which cannot be equitably applied to all who place their services at the door of the state.
What cannot be equalised are the levels that must be paid to all state employees since they offer diverse services, but not that when one group is entitled to end-of-service benefits that cannot be enjoyed by others.
Whatever the justness of their cause, the doctors have more than demonstrated that they are important and deserve to be appropriately remunerated. They also deserve formalised agreements of conditions of service.
They have won the support of the people. Thus, once the government accepts their cause but the effect of the strike is more pronounced on the vulnerable, they must be prepared to resume work, even as negotiations continue, so that the people who have given them their support will have no cause to regret backing them.
They must listen to the cries of the deprived, who have been denied quality but affordable health care.
The striking doctors must open their hearts as flowers which must remain open to the health of the vulnerable and their entreaties as softly falling dew, which must be received in good faith and with kind hearts. The doctors must not just demand their pound of flesh. They must do so without spilling any blood.