The Ghana Registered Nurses and Midwives Association (GRNMA) has threatened to go on strike across the country if the government follows through on its plan to fire nurses and midwives hired into the public sector following the elections on December 7.
Over 5,000 nurses and midwives in the public sector would be impacted by the directive, which will negatively impact healthcare delivery, according to the GRNMA’s leadership.
The dismissal should be stopped right away, according to Association President Perpetual Ofori Ampofo, who made this statement in an exclusive interview with 3news.
Mrs Ampofo warned that, “any dismissal of those nurses and midwives will lead to a nationwide strike.”
“There is a lot of tension in our fraternity, and you should be on our platforms, and we are saying that if they go ahead and suspend we will have no choice than to stand in solidarity with our colleagues. And the solidarity means that if you are asking them to stay at home then we will all stay at home in solidarity with them,” she explained.
Heads of State Institutions were instructed a few weeks ago by the Chief of Staff to cancel the appointments of individuals hired following the December 2024 general elections whose names, as of January 2025, are not on the Controller and Accountant-General’s payroll.
Those workers, some of whom are nurses and midwives, have since become agitated over the direction. These impacted nurses and midwives were hired by the previous administration in the 2020 and 2021 batches.
According to Mrs. Ofori Ampofo, the GRNMA’s leadership has discussed the issue with Kwabena Mintah Akandoh, the Minister of Health.
In the meantime, the Ghana Health Service’s Director General has released a statement requesting that institution heads start firing the recently hired nurses and midwives before any inquiries are carried out.
Mrs. Ampofo called this development unlawful.
“We already have our colleagues on the field experiencing burn out, units and departments that are not meeting the ideal nurse to patient ratios and also faced with emigration of our colleagues into high earning income countries and therefore there is a huge workload on those that are post and working,” she lamented.
According to her, “If you we have been able to recruit nurses and midwives to augment the care that is being given why would we want to now suspend them to go and sit at home for investigations to be conducted? In our view, they should be at post for investigations to be conducted and that will inform whatever actions we would want to take but not the reverse.”
She urged the Health Minister to put an end to the dismissal procedure.
“We had a meeting with the Minister on the 13th of February and he explained to us, but he did not give us any indication that the nurses and midwives are going to be suspended,” she said.
