At least 25 health aides working with the Ministry of Health (MOH) in the Greater Accra Region, have not been paid since December 2004, according to documents made available to the Ghana News Agency (GNA).
The health aides, who underwent six months training between June and November 2004, started working full-time from December 2004 in various government hospitals and polyclinics in the Region, but have up till date not received their official appointment letters and salaries.
Information gathered by the GNA on four of the health aides, some of whom are single mothers currently working full-time at the Mamprobi Polyclinic, indicate that they have only managed to survive on meagre allowances of between GH¢ 21 and GH¢ 60 a month, which they receive from the Polyclinic on loan to be refunded on payment of their salaries.
"The rationale for training us to work as health aides was to ease our social and economic hardships, so I don't understand why they have not paid us for four years. How do they expect us to survive in this harsh economy?" one of them asked?
Another wondered why those employed much later under the National Youth Employment Programme (NYEP) are being paid regularly "but those of us who were employed ahead of the NYEP have not had our appointment letters even though we've been working full-time for the past four years".
The facts of the case, as contained in several documents in the possession of the GNA, are that on May 7, 2004 the health aides, then without any employable skills, responded to an invitation by the MOH and went for an interview to be trained as health aides.
The 25 who passed the interview were trained for six months and immediately started working with the various health institutions where they were trained.
After working for almost two years without formal appointments and salaries, the Human Resource Development Division (HRDD) of the Ghana Health Service wrote a letter to the MOH on November 22, 2006, signed by Mr. Peter Obiri-Yeboah, seeking authority to recruit the 25 health aides formally into the Ghana Health system. In that letter their names were categorically listed.
After two months, the MOH wrote a letter dated January 9, 2007 to the Head of Civil Service requesting for permission to formally recruit the 25 health aides, to help ease the rising health care delivery burden due to the introduction of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS).
The letter, signed by Dr. Yaw Antwi-Boasiako, stated in its opening paragraph: "I wish to seek permission in accordance with Section 63 (1) of the Civil Service Law 1993 (PNDC Law 327) to recruit twenty-five (25) Health Aides for the Greater Accra Region."
It noted that the Health Aides were specifically trained as auxiliary staff to support healthcare delivery in the face of the acute shortage of health care professionals.
The Head of Civil Service in a letter dated May 8, 2007 and signed by Mr. Tennyson Foli, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), granted the MOH permission to recruit the 25 Health Aides, but advised the MOH to seek financial clearance from the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning (MOFEP) in line with MOFEP's circular number B383/FC dated February 8, 2006.
The February 8, 2006 MOFEP circular placed a ceiling on public sector employment and required every state-owned institution to seek the permission of the Ministry before undertaking any new recruitment.
The MOH has since written to the MOFEP but nothing has been heard of the MOFEP till date. Meanwhile the Health Aides continue to work for the MOH full time without salaries and formal appointment letters.
After running around for months without any positive news from the MOFEP, the Health Aides in a letter dated March 19, 2008, sought the intervention of the then Greater Accra Regional Director of Health, Dr. John B. K. Yabani, but that has yielded no positive result either, except that they were recently given some forms to fill on appointments.
Meanwhile, the fate of the 25 health aides is still in a limbo. They remain unsure when their appointment letters will come and from what date their salaries will be calculated and paid.
When the GNA contacted the MOH to comment on the issue, Mr. James Antwi, an MOH official who said he was on top of issues concerning the recruitment of health aides, said in 2004 the MOH mandated all regions to train and recruit 100 health aides each, but Korle Bu Teaching Hospital in Accra and Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital (KATH) in Kumasi were each mandated to train 200.
"We therefore trained and recruited a total of 1,200 health aides in that exercise and all of them are being paid their monthly salaries regularly as we speak," he said.
He noted that some of the other government health institutions also went ahead and trained their own health aides without the mandate of the MOH, saying that the MOH did not budget for those extra health aides and that was what had created the problem of the non-payment of their salaries since 2004.
Mr Antwi said in the Central Region, for instance, 52 extra health aides were trained by some government health institutions without the mandate of MOH.
He maintained that the four years of non-payment of salaries to health aides who through no fault of theirs had been working for the government, was not a major issue of public concern.
The health aides in question include Mercy Blay-Tewiah, Joana Quaye, Jennifer Ahu and Gifty Ahove, all of Mamprobi Polyclinic; Grace Tawiah, Belinda Tetteh, Esther Ndinyah and Vera Tetteh, all of the Ridge Hospital; Beatrice Amoabeng, Abigail Ziko, Angela Klu, Elizabeth Tetteh, Patience Hadzide, Patience Adenta and Regina Sampa, all of Amasaman Hospital.
The rest are Millicent Amartey, Evelyn Addison, Esther Ansah, Naomi Asmah and Helen Narh, all of Tema General Hospital; Lilly Darkwa, Edna Agadzi Addo and Doris Acquah of Achimota Hospital, Salifu Asana of the Mamobi Polyclinic and Georgina Kissi of La General Hospital.