The Ghana Medical Association (GMA) has declared a nationwide strike effective Thursday July 30.
This means the GMA has withdrawn all out-patient department (OPD) services following the failure of government to provide them with their conditions of service after the expiration of the final deadline on Wednesday.
A crunch meeting with the Ministers of Employment and Labour Relations, Finance and Health and the doctors on Wednesday ended in a deadlock.
Dr. Frank Serebour, General Secretary of the GMA in an interview with Citi News’ Raymond Acquah said they have activated their road map which in the third week, leads to their resignation en masse.
“What we are saying is that we did have a deadline in place which indicated that by the end of June 2015, if we didn’t have conditions of service in place we will take certain decisions that will shake the entire system. At that point the negotiations had started so we extended the deadline to today 6pm but as we speak the conditions of service has not been fully negotiated and signed what it means is that the road map is activated so it’s in force.”
He added that “from tomorrow what is going to happen is that there will not be OPD services until next week where we will stop emergency services then the following week we clear the hospitals and then we can all go home and sleep and declare ourselves unemployed”.
Dr. Serebour also stated that “it is quite interesting that we have basically wasted the last three weeks apart from not having any consensus we felt that the people we were negotiating with who represented government did not have the mandate to negotiate.”
The General Assembly of the Ghana Medical Association (GMA) extended its threat to resign en bloc to today to allow for negotiations with government to proceed in good faith.
“It is clear government was not ready to meet the deadline we all agreed on in our ground rules,” Dr Serebour stated.
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By: Raymond Acquah/citifmonline.com/Ghana