KBTH junior nurses demonstrate , Daily Graphic

Junior nurses at the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital (KBTH) in Accra yesterday staged a demonstration against management of the hospital for the non-payment of their salaries and allowances for 21 months.
Wearing red bands and chanting songs, the over 600 aggrieved nurses marched in front of the hospital’s administration block.
In a petition presented to the acting Chief Executive of KBTH, Reverend Albert O. Botchway, the nurses said they had not been paid their salaries or allowances since they were employed, a development which they described in their petition as “our painful situation”.
 “Expectedly we have reached our limits and we cannot stretch further; to stretch further means to break harder beyond repairs,” they stated in the petition.
They, therefore, called for a memorandum of understanding to be signed between them and management, spelling out the timelines for the payment of their arrears.
“We want them to sign an MOU with us because we cannot continue to work with all these uncertainties. We have petitioned various key stakeholders including the President and Speaker of Parliament but we have not had any response,” Mr Abdul Salam Mohammed, a leader of the aggrieved nurses, said.
A nurse who did not want to be named told the Daily Graphic that each of them  was owned between  GH29, 000 and GH35,000 in arrears.
Management response
However, at an emergency meeting among the executive of the Ghana Registered Nurses Association (GRNA), the management of KBTH and leaders of the agitated group of nurses, the Korle-Bu management said cheques had been issued   for their September salary.
Rev Botchway said management would consult the government and other stakeholders to discuss the payment of the arrears, having paid the September salary with part of the hospital’s Internally Generated Funds, upon a government directive.
Though no agreement was documented, the President of the GRNA, Mr Kweku Asare-Krobea, appealed to his colleagues to accept management’s proposal to be given a month for it to finalise negotiations for the payment of the arrears.
Nurses react
Some of the nurses said they would not resume work until their full salaries and allowances had been paid because the one month’s salary paid to them was a pittance.
 “I have a baby to take care of, but I leave her home every day to come to work and at the end of the month I go home without any salary, the situation is now unbearable,”  one of them said.