The Ministry of Health has comprised a Negotiating Team to continue liaisons with health care workers over pay and conditions, it announced yesterday.

Meanwhile, the Greater Accra branch of the Health Workers' Union, an umbrella body representing associations of nurses, pharmacists, lab technicians and other non-doctor medical staff, has issued a four-week ultimatum to the Ministry.

Today, members of the Health Workers" Union nationwide will meet to decide whether to join the Accra group’s action, and to discuss the way forward for their protest: clearly, patience with Government is running out.

Last year, both doctors and other medical workers crippled the health system by striking for several months - and there are fears this could resume. If satisfactory action over pay has not been taken by the Ministry of Health by February 5, the Greater Accra health workers, and perhaps those nationwide, will again consider further action.

"For now, we are giving Government time for the appellate body to make its report,” Korquayi Stephen, Chairman of the Greater Accra branch of HWU, told The Statesman yesterday. “But we want equal pay for equal work, and believe the monetary score should be the same [for doctors and other medical staff].”

The appellate body was set up by the Ministry in November 2006 to listen to and discuss the grievances of health workers over a new salary system, introduced in July last year.

Under the long promised new pay scheme, all medical staff saw some level of pay increase, in line with their demands. However, rises for doctors were significantly greater than those for other health workers – in some cases 100 percent more – and the Health Workers Union has continued to protest at the discrepancies.

Based on their grievances, the appellate body is now writing a report, which was due for publication by March 31, 2007. The report is to be used to inform rectifications in the salary structure, and future decisions within the Health Service.

The HWU has now requested an earlier release of the document, which will look at ways to redress current disparities in the health sector pay system. “Once it is released, we will need to sit down, look at the proposals and come up with our response,” said Mr Stephen, who is a clinical pharmacist. “We think one month is long enough to wait.”

“The Health Minister and the President know about our grievances, and it should be a simple matter to sort out.”

Dan Osman Mwin, the Public Relations Officer at the Ministry of Health, agrees. “The Minister is aware of the genuine distortions in the pay structure,” he told The Statesman yesterday. The continued agitation from the Health Workers Union is based on “very real concerns” according to the Ministry – concerns which Government is now committed to resolving.

However, the process is not as “simple” as the HWU is claiming; but rather a complicated issue which will take time to work out between the various stakeholders, including the Ministries of Health and Finance, the Ghana Health Service, the National Labour Commission and the Controller Accountant-General, Mr Osman Mwin pointed out.

He appealed to medical workers to put the life and health of their patients above grievances over pay, because “we don’t want a repetition of what happened last time.”

At Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital in Accra, over 60 otherwise-preventable deaths are thought to have resulted during the strikes; which saw many hospital wards completely closed down for weeks, as no new patients were being admitted, and other wards manned by insufficient skeletal staffs.