Nurses Strike!

Nurses

The medical delivery system is suffering a setback as junior and student nurses, numbering about 30,000 countrywide, have stopped work in protest at a number of anomalies.

At a press conference held at the Medical School Canteen, Korle Bu Teaching Hospital, yesterday, they pointed out that most of their colleagues who had been working since 2009 had not been paid salaries.

They pointed out that 'all staff nurses in the Ghana Health Service sector who started working since March 2010 had also not been issued with their appointment letters let alone being paid.'

They are suffering what they described as social and economic embarrassment due to the treatment being meted out to them.

They rubbished the excuse by the Ghana Health Service that they were unable to reconcile the date by which they were to be appointed, given the referral of some of them in their licensing examinations. That, they claimed, was a contradiction to what they said was contained in a correspondence from the Ministry of Health.

The correspondence titled 'Backdating Of Appointments' agreed that in accordance with the directive from the Finance and Economic Planning Ministry, the payment of internship allowance shall commence with the 2011 group of interns, adding, 'Previous groups are therefore to receive salary arrears as has always been done.'

Only the Ghana Health Service, they pointed out, had refused to comply with the directive, adding that the teaching hospitals were complying accordingly.

They also frowned upon what they described as the unfair back payment of the Registered General Nurse Group 10, according to the proposed internship allowance by the Fair Wages and Salary Commission and the Ministry of Health because of a number of factors.

They, for instance, stated that since the proposed take off of the newly-mandated national service by every student nurse, after completion of the 3-year diploma training, the Group 10 batch of nurses had been receiving an allowance of GHC48.67 among others reasons.

'The Ghana Nurse And Midwife Trainees Association hereby declare unequivocally today 3rd October 2011 that all 2011 nurse-interns shall not, and the emphasis is shall not, begin their national service this week as scheduled without government and the agencies responsible for determining a respectful remuneration, say 80-90% of staff nurses salary that should be mapped onto the single spine salary structure,' they stressed in the statement signed by their president, Andy T. Holyfield.

Student nurses and midwives perform an important function in the overstretched medical delivery system.

By A.R. Gomda