<<Print>>The Minority in Parliament has urged the government to take immediate steps to address the problems in the health sector, particularly the strike by the Ghana Medical Association (GMA).
It also advised the doctors to accept what the government had offered them for now and return to work, while allowing themselves enough room to dialogue with the governing authority.
Addressing a news conference in Accra yesterday, the Minority Spokesman on Health, Dr Richard Anane, said inviting Cuban doctors to assist in healthcare in the country was not the answer to the industrial action by doctors.
He said the country took a similar action in the 1980s which proved not beneficial to the nation in the long run.
Rather, Dr Anane said, dialogue and other conflict resolution methods were what were needed to ensure an amicable resolution of the impasse.
He stated that he had trained several Cuban doctors in the past and suggested that they were not as competent as their Ghanaian counterparts.
Sack presidential staffer
Dr Anane, who is also the Member of Parliament for Nhyiaeso, chastised the government for releasing proposals from closed-door negotiations with the doctors, saying it was a breach of faith and done to pit the public against the doctors.
He said the various statements made by government communicators on radio and television also inflamed passions, adding that that move by the government was "amateurish" and amounted to "infantile gimmickry".
He urged President John Mahama to, as a matter of urgency, sanction the presidential staffer who leaked the GMA's proposals to the public and give the doctors some level of assurance by addressing the major issues on their list of requests.
‘Rescind decision’
Dr Anane reminded the doctors that notwithstanding the weight of their grievances, their strike was resulting in deaths that could otherwise be prevented.
"There are cases of working people who now suffer from various ailments which could have been addressed but who are otherwise excusing themselves from work. Productivity for the individual and the nation is being negatively affected.
"There are people who are sick today and who, for lack of medicare in these crises moments, may become permanently disabled. In this stand-off, it is the very poor in society who are bearing the brunt of the doctor's strike," he added,
He said if and when a solution was found to the problem, the situations recounted could not be reversed.
Restrain communicators
The Nhyiaeso MP advised the government to restrain all its communicators from making unguided statements on the matter while the negotiations were going on.
He recalled that when doctors in Kenya declared a strike recently, leading to the loss of 11 lives, the government of that country quickly called for dialogue, leading to an amicable solution.
He noted that in Ghana, it was rather party communicators with caustic tongues who were being unleashed on the doctors.
Labour Commission
Dr Anane said the frequency of strikes had brought to the fore the weakness of the National Labour Commission (NLC), adding that the organisation had become a one-man outfit that had proved incapable of dealing with the problems on the labour front.
The NLC, he said, needed to be strengthened with competent people capable of dealing with issues brought before it.
"We urge the government to, as a matter of urgency, constitute the board of the commission to ensure the effective implementation of its mandate," he added.