Story: Mary Ankrah
THE Minister of Health, Mr Alban Bagbin, has appealed to the Ghana Medical Association (GMA) and its sister organisations to partner the government to find a long-lasting solution to agitation by health workers over poor service conditions and remuneration.
He said such collaborative engagement was a better option than strikes which were usually used as means of resolving some challenges by doctors, nurses and other health workers.
He made the appeal at the induction ceremony of newly qualified medical and dental practitioners in Accra last Friday.
One hundred and eighty-six newly qualified medical and dental practitioners were inducted into the profession.
They were made up of 144 doctors from the University of Ghana Medical School, 16 dentists from the University of Ghana Dental School and 26 doctors who were abroad.
Mr Bagbin said the problem of service condition and poor remuneration had persisted for over 20 years and had been a difficult task for successive governments to resolve.
Therefore, he said: “All should put shoulders to the wheel and look for long-lasting solutions rather than piecemeal, quick fixes”.
As much as the people could not deny the health professionals their right to advocate better conditions of service, Mr Bagbin said they should not do so in blatant disregard for the lives of people entrusted into their care.
“If we could sometimes eschew the drama of our demands and resort to constructive engagement, accommodation, understanding, and compromise without visiting pain on our own people, we will be better off in the long term,” he added.
The health minister said in a bid to resolve those challenges, people must recognise the scarcity of resources and the need to allocate them as efficiently as possible.
He said the government would do its best to motivate all hard-working health workers across the country.
To that end, he said the government had revived the staff welfare schemes in all the health facilities and instituted a national best health worker award scheme scheduled for August, 2012.
In addition, he used the occasion to encourage the newly qualified medical doctors and dentists to accept postings to the rural areas to extend quality health care to the people.
He said about 1,110 doctors, representing 50 per cent of all doctors in the country, were in the Greater Accra while 23, representing less than one per cent, were in the Upper West Region serving a population of about a million.
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