President John Dramani Mahama has attributed the recent nurses’ strike to what he calls failure of the
Health Ministry’s human resource system.
Over 7000 nurses and midwives embarked on a nationwide strike a few days ago to protest the non-payment of their salaries.
[contextly_sidebar id=”QgOVagfwhyQenXPJqShnAXON8holJJbh”]Speaking on a France based TV station, France 24, the President explained that the challenge is as a result of the inability of the Health Ministry”to process quickly enough the data of new nurses so that the Accountant General’s Department can capture it and begin to pay them.”
“The issue of the nurses’ strike is not to do with asking for more money. It is a failure of our human resource system….Often the postings are done, the nurses go to post, it takes the Ministry of Health too long to process their data and so they stay without salary for some period of time,” the President added.
He was however quick to add that measures are being taken to rectify those challenges.
“What we need to do is to balance it out in terms of economic management. We should negotiate these things and so we are doing that already. We have sat down with labour and we are talking about what the percentage increase for next year should be and we are going to fix that in the budget and once we fix it into the budget all of us must help to maintain fiscal discipline.”
In a related development, the Controller and Accountant General’s Department has released money for the payment of outstanding arrears owed nurses in 3 psychiatric hospitals in Ghana.
In the statement, the Ministry said that the payment was made “to about 133 nurses who form part of some nurses to be paid outstanding arrears. Currently staffs of the Ministry of Health and Controller and Accountant General’s Department are keying in the inputs for payment of the rest of the salary arrears as the system has been opened for this purpose.”
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By: Marian Efe Ansah/citifmonline.com/Ghana