Calling retired nurses and midwives to volunteer will not solve the problem – GRNMA

The Ghana Registered Nurses and Midwives Association (GRNMA) says the government, calling on retired nurses and midwives to volunteer their services in place of the striking health workers, will not help solve the situation.

“For every retiree, if you do your nursing job for as long as 30 to 35 years, by the time you are retiring, you are down with serious back aches, serious knee problems, and all sort of medical conditions. At the time they retire, they are taking care of all these medical challenges and still with financial difficulties and the system is not even taking care of them,” she added.

The President of GRNMA made this known during a media interaction following the appeal by Mr. Kwabena Mintah Akandoh, the Minister of Health, calling on retired nurses and midwives to volunteer their services for a brief period pending the resolution of the ongoing industrial action by nurses and midwives.

“It is not as if we receive any kind of transport allowance to get to work. Whatever we receive at the end of the day, we take out of our rent; we take out our transport, and we take care of every need of ours in terms of what our dependents will offer us. What is due needs to be given to us,” she stated.

The appeal comes after a meeting between the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Finance, and the GRNMA on Monday, ending inconclusively with the government citing budgetary limitations as justification for its inability to meet the demands.

As a result, officials proposed deferring the implementation of the association’s 2024 Collective Agreement to 2026, a proposal GRNMA has strongly rejected.

Mrs Perpetual Ofori-Ampofo, President of the GRNMA, said although their services had been redrawn, arrangements had been made for skeletal services when necessary, adding that meeting their demands financially was necessary.

Mrs Ofori-Ampofo said, “Monitoring the strike, we have even given directives to our regional branches and leadership, such that in the very critical areas, where we have our patients in critical condition, adults care or paediatric care, we are putting some kind of skeletal staff there. We are allowing them to care for them until their conditions are stable.”

If you leave students’ nurses and you leave rotational nurses, those two categories of nurses are supposed to work under supervision. Under supervision from their senior colleagues, maybe our clients do not know the circumstances under which our colleagues are working.

The strike began with the withdrawal of all Out-Patient Department (OPD) services nationwide from June 4 to 8 and a complete withdrawal of all services, commencing from June 9, 2025, onwards despite the efforts of the government to get the Association to rescind their decision.

The Ghana Registered Nurses and Midwives Association (GRNMA), in May this year, announced a phased withdrawal of services starting in early June 2025.

The industrial action by the association is to protest the government’s prolonged delay in implementing its collective agreement.

The agreement, a comprehensive document covering all nurses and midwives in Ghana, was signed in May 2024 by the GRNMA, the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Finance, and the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission, yet it remains unimplemented a year later.

Source: GNA

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