Vice President of the Ghana Medical Association, Dr Justice Yankson, has revealed that service delivery is going to be compromised should the government’s freeze on public sector employment include the health sector.

According to him, the health sector is already confronted with severe challenges including a shortage of doctors due to a number of them fleeing abroad in search of greener pasture. He indicated that any attempt to carry out the hiring freeze will not bode well for the country.

“Service delivery is going to be compromised. So far as we are concerned, this business of no employment in the health sector in particular and if we go down to talk about doctors, it’s going to be a disaster.”
Dr Justice Yankson

Dr Yankson noted that with the nation’s population steadily increasing, government’s ban on employment “will be disastrous” for the country. He explained that Ghana has a population that keeps growing in terms of the national population and the doctor-patient ratio is not one that the country can boast of because it is way off the WHO standards.

“People are going to resign, people are already leaving the country as we speak, people are going to retire. Unfortunately, being a human institution, some will even have to go off because they’re unwell.”
Dr Justice Yankson

Dr Yankson stated that coupled with the fact that there is an ongoing “aggressive Agenda 111 project” in the health sector which are also expected to be manned, there will be shortage of human resource to fill those positions.

“I can’t see how the current workforce beyond all the description I have given can be redistributed to man all these areas. Naturally, we’ll all be burnt out.”
Dr Justice Yankson

Impact of hiring freeze on health sector

Commenting of government’s ban on all public sector employment, except under very critical condition, he highlighted that while the government has failed to clarify what it means by ‘very critical condition’, it behoves on government to exempt the health sector from the employment freeze to ensure the safety and general wellbeing of Ghanaians.

“As it is now it’s a bit vague… Who determines critical? And beyond that it’s been qualified ‘very critical’. Is it at the whims and caprices of the number one man of the state? Is it at the level of the Minister or who? But if we’re going to sign onto, just as we saw in 2015 where we had at least a very broad or clear-cut definition which said health and education were exempted I think that that is the nature of the agreement we should be looking at.”
Dr Justice Yankson

On his part, Associate Professor of Development Economics at the University of Ghana, Professor Ebo Turkson, stated that the country has reached a point where certain difficult choices have to be made.

He indicated that the problems that confront the economy call for decisive and tough decisions to be made to rescue the country from its current state, especially with regards to expenditure and domestic revenue generation.

“I think we’re at the point where certain difficult choices have to be made. And any time we get to this point, that has always been the justification that we’re in a mess and we need to get out of the mess.”
Professor Ebo Turkson