GMA Strike Action: Upper East Sits On Keg Of Gunpowder

Doctors and pharmacists in the Upper East Region have agreed to back out of the ongoing nationwide strike action declared by the leadership of the Ghana Medical Association (GMA).

But the region is sitting on a keg of gunpowder which might explode anytime soon to kill its joy. This is because the non-striking physicians and chemists, though they say the decision to stay back at post is in the interest of an extremely deprived region, have also hinted that the grace period will gradually fade off if their demands are not met in time.

Another fearsome development which is already forecasting its shadow is the pharmacists’ ripening threat to join the strike bandwagon anytime soon— an afterthought yet to creep into the mind’s eye of the doctors says Dr. Peter Baffoe, Medical Superintendent of the Regional Hospital, in an interview with this blogger in Bolgatanga: “Conscious of the effect of the [strike] action, we have put some measures in place especially for emergency cases as well as maternal and child health issues. We only pray and hope that the strike does not linger for long.”

An attempt by this correspondent to talk to the head and some staff members of the Pharmacy Department at the hospital was met with concrete walls of hostile rebuff. Later, some staff members anonymously told this correspondent that the pharmacists at the facility were angry “and could have pounced on you” because the decision to pull out of the nationwide strike action was imposed on them from above.

Dr. Baffoe, again, says meetings are underway between the pharmacist body and the Regional Health Directorate on their grievances. The outcome of the meetings will determine the path the patients will take, he stated.

A walk round departments and wards by this paper can confirm that the hospital has remained as busy as a beehive. Doctors and their inseparable partners in pharmacy are at post and attending to a mammoth turnout of patients in what is supposed to be a nationwide strike affair.

Mr. Ali Anaba, a patient who just came out of a ward, told me he had a quality time with his doctor, and he was fine— very fine. A tall, dark-skinned mother in a long queue at the Out-Patients Department (OPD), Joyce Asumaka, said she had retrieved her baby’s folder from the records department and was confident she would enter the consulting room in no time with her sleeping little one.

The doctor-patient ratio in the region has been one to thirty-six thousand, and nurse-patient ratio: one to two thousand and fifty. Any prolonged period of such strike action would only detonate a keg of gunpowder on the ‘shelterless’ heads of patients in the region.