Health workers’ salaries among the highest— TUC boss

THE salaries of health workers have ranked among the highest in the public sector since 2006, Mr Kofi Asamoah, the acting Secretary-General of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), has noted.
He has, therefore, commended the government for taking bold initiatives to improve salaries and working conditions in the health sector as a way of reducing the brain drain.
Mr Asamoah made the remark at the opening of the second plenary meeting of the West African Health Sector Unions Network (WASHUN) in Tema.
The union is made up of public health sector unions in Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Mr Asamoah said the meeting was being held at a time when the public sector in Ghana was going through another reform, explaining that there had been a significant increase in public sector pay since 2001 but that because the increases were on a relatively low base, public sector workers were still earning lower than their counterparts in the private sector.
He said as part of the reform process, all jobs in the public sector were being evaluated to provide the basis for the determination of salaries based on the principle of equal pay for work of equal value.
Mr Asamoah gave the assurance that the unions were participating in all the processes, under the leadership of the Ghana TUC, to ensure that members in the public sector were rewarded equitably.
He noted that the largest unit in the public sector was the health sector, which employed over 50,000 workforce, but said he was optimistic that it would increase in future as Ghana strove to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and moved further to become a middle-income country by 2015.
Mr Asamoah stated that Ghana needed to do a lot more to achieve a significant improvement in the health status of the people, especially children under the age of five.
He called on the meeting to come up with practical recommendations that could halt or reduce the brain drain, particularly in the health sector.
The Deputy Minister of Health, Mr Abraham Dwuma Odoom, urged the participants to share information, experiences and exchanges on issues affecting members, as well as health systems in the sub-region, since they had similar disease patterns.
He observed that as members of health sector unions, it was their responsibility to ensure that there was constant dialogue between policy formulators and implementers, such that the reforms would be focused on addressing the needs of their countries.
Mr Odoom said the role of dialogue should not be left in the hands of non-unionised groups which had the tendency to fight for their selfish aims.
The National Chairman of the Health Services Workers Union of the TUC, Rev Richard K. Yeboah, announced that WASHUN would publish quarterly journals beginning this year to advocate for increased spending on health care and request member governments to pay competitive salaries to uphold the principle of equal pay for work of equal value.