Public sector doctors withdraw services

About 3,000 doctors in public health institutions will begin another strike today to protest against delays in the payment of their market premium arrears for 2012.

The doctors say they will initially withdraw all out-patient services and attend to only emergencies and in-patients up to April 14, 2013.

According to the Ghana Medical Association (GMA), if the government failed to address their grievances, the doctors would suspend all emergency services on April 15.

However, they would continue with their services to in-patients until all of them had been discharged.

The doctors arrived at those decisions at the GMA’s second National Executive Council (NEC) meeting in Kumasi yesterday.

At a news conference to state the doctors’ position, the President of the GMA, Dr Kwabena Opoku-Adusei, said they suspended the first strike in February on the agreement that the government and its agents would implement the decisions taken to address their concerns, but since then nothing had been done to that effect.

He said the doctors had decided to take the industrial action because the government and its agencies had refused to pay the current market premium on their basic salaries, contrary to the ruling of the National Labour Commission (NLC).

Again, the state agencies had failed to pay the market premium arrears of doctors accrued from January 2012 to date, while the government had refused to correct the reduced pension contributions of doctors, he said.

Additionally, the GMA claimed that the payment of the correct conversion difference to doctors had not been carried out.

He said after exhausting all avenues for negotiations, and taking into consideration the fact that several meetings and memoranda signed between the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission (FWSC) and the GMA had failed to resolve the issues, the GMA and its members had no option but to embark on the action.

“The NEC of the GMA would like to put on record that the GMA will not accept any piecemeal and verbal solutions to these problems. The GMA shall only rescind the decision when there is clear evidence that government, through the relevant agencies, has corrected these anomalies and payment duly made,” Dr Opoku-Adusei said.

Answering questions from journalists, the GMA President said the fact that doctors’ work had been designated as essential service under the labour laws did not mean one party in any negotiations could take advantage of the law to cheat the other.

He said that was why the NLC was constitutionally mandated to be the arbiter in times of disagreements, so that there would be industrial peace.

“But in this case, what we see is that the other party (the government and its relevant agencies) has failed to abide by the rulings of the NLC and we cannot sit down for this to continue,” he said.

He expressed regret that the NLC had become almost powerless and questioned why it could not go to court to compel the government to pay doctors.

Dr Opoku-Adusei stated that doctors were law-abiding citizens and that explained why they had religiously followed all the laws laid down to address their grievances.

“What Ghanaians should know is that we are not looking for any new money from our employer. We are only looking for what is due us and we shall not retreat until we are paid,” he stressed.

Story: Kwame Asare Boadu