HEALTH is wealth and a healthy nation is a wealthy nation. Any country that has a healthy workforce is deemed to be a wealthy one since productivity is better off. And statistics from countries with healthy population have proven that assertion.
GOVERNMENTS all over the world have worked to ensure that they have a healthy workforce that can work to improve their economy. And Ghana is no exception, especially as governments from antiquity, whether colonial, military dictatorship or formed on constitutional democracy, have worked to ensure that the country improves upon its healthcare delivery.
INDEED, it is against this background that our governments have constructed health facilities and impressed upon health professionals to manage these facilities efficiently. It must also be noted that governments, over the years, could be said to have managed well the issue of doctors? salaries, emoluments and motivations. All these, we believe, are done to ensure that the doctors have job satisfaction to eventually ensure citizens are in good shape to work to move the economy forward.
THUS, acting in accordance with that policy, governments since independence have managed better the issue of strikes by medical personnel in the country. Never have doctors strikes lasted so long without government intervening to reach an amicable settlement with them on time to ensure they return to work to save many from dying.
ALSO, the state often, biennially receives medical professionals from Cuba, but they are not enough to even top up our own personnel to reduce the shortage of doctors.? According to official statistics, the number of doctors in Ghana gives us a doctor to patient ratio of 1:10,000.? That means by absolute numbers one doctor represents 10,000 people of our 24 million-plus population.? That is way below the World Health Organisation (WHO) standard of 1:5,000. THEREFORE, several administrations have taken several steps to make sure more doctors are trained each year to augment their numbers in future. Such measures include the reduction in tuition fees for the training of Ghanaian medical professionals. For instance, while foreign students pay US$10,000.00 annually at the University of Ghana Medical School for training, fee paying Ghanaians pay US$6,000.00. Similarly, at the School of Medical Sciences of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST,) foreign students pay US$7,000.00 while fee-paying Ghanaians pay US$2,500.00.
IT is therefore imperative that government after spending much on the training of medical professionals reap the benefits of their training through the offering of health services to fellow citizens. However, just as government, and all of us, deserves the right to demand from doctors the delivery of good healthcare services to us, the doctors, as workers, also have the right to demand the payment of their market premium arrears as well as conversion difference allowances and also the correction of anomalies in their pension contributions.
FOR us at Today, we think that the doctors have a case in calling on the Mahama administration to settle once and for all issues on the table about their salaries and allowances. National administration, in the name of fairness should treat the doctors the same way their fellow politicians and other colleague workers have been treated.
IT is not in the interest of national administration in looking for a tactic to avoid heeding the legitimate concerns of the doctors to intimidate the striking doctors with news of the importation of Cuban doctors to take care of emergency and other Out-Patient-Department (OPD) services. What government through the announcement of the arrival of the 350 doctors has done is an indirect communication to other organised unions that there are alternatives to whatever service they render to the state.? Unfortunately, that alternative will not even begin to scratch the surface of the problem created in our hospitals by the absence of our doctors.
THE arrival of the Cuban doctors comes with its own challenges which government needs to rise to and help solve between them and their future patients. Such include the language barrier and the settlement of their allowances.
PLACE the announced $150.00 monthly allowance to be paid to each Cuban doctor importee side-by-side with what the state has to do for our doctors, and you realise bringing them (not in the usual exchange programme, but) simply to replace doctors will result in spending an amount of money which should have been used to solve the doctors strike.? $150.00 on each may sound like spending little on the doctors, but let us consider the following arithmetic:
$150.00 for 350 Cuban doctors comes to $52,500.00 per month; that is a huge expense, but it does not stop there.? Ghana would also have to find accommodation for these 350 doctors and possibly give them vehicles, free utilities and place other facilities at their disposal for free.? Thus if the state pays each Cuban doctor accommodation allowance of say $150.00 per month, that is another $52,500.00 on state expenditure and counting.
IN a nutshell, if bringing Cuban doctors is simply to replace Ghanaian doctors, we on Today are sorry to state that Ghana is better off spending the total amount we will spend on Cuban doctors to solve our own problem.
LET the NDC propaganda in portraying the doctors as villains stop now.? Let the vacuous foolhardiness on the part of national administration in refusing to address the issues causing the doctors? strike stop now.
