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Access to high quality health care services is a matter of life and death. In other words, prompt access to rapid response when someone is sick, access to proper medication and care can save a life. However, failure to access the foregoing can result in unnecessary suffering, even death.
We had a situation in our country when our people sometimes failed to access the services because workers withdrew their services. Public nurses, radiographers, junior and middle level doctors and so on used to embark on frequent, prolonged strikes, demanding higher salaries and improved working conditions. They know that the services they provide are critical so would not relent before their demands were met. The Government, realising the criticality of quality health care services, would be left with no choice but to give in to the workers’ demands.
There was a good amount of public as well as official displeasure at the frequency of the strikes, amid murmurs that some healthcare workers and their unionists were being prodded by some forces to stage strikes to harm the health delivery system with the main idea being to score political points against the Government.
We think authorities have now responded to these challenges in an effective manner. To create conditions for better salaries and working conditions, the Government has come up with the Health Service Amendment Act which caps the period over which workers can undertake a strike to 72 hours and creates an independent body charged with ensuring good working conditions for staff. Also, the new law, recognising that some health service unionists tended to allow themselves to be used by some forces, now imposes criminal liability on them if they violate sections of the Act.
The Health Service Amendment Act is, in our opinion, a good piece of legislation which guarantees health staff the right to strike, yet designates them as an essential service in line with the Constitution. Furthermore, it creates a more powerful structure to work around improvement of working conditions of staff as well as handling disciplinary issues.
It must delight the public, most of whom rely on the public health delivery system that, due to the three-day cap for an industrial action that is set by the law, they will enjoy a relatively uninterrupted access to relevant services unlike in the past when nurses, doctors and support staff could declare strikes which went on and on. This means better health for our people. It means greater workplace stability as well, which is important for national delivery.
The penalties that the law imposes on unionists look deterrent to ensure discipline among them.
But the workers must find it good that the new law upholds their right to protest noting that in exercising it, they must do so in a responsible manner.
The law is not just demanding 120 percent commitment to duty from nurses, doctors and support staff. It promotes the Health Service Board to the level of Health Service Commission whose work would be to promote the interests of employees and the industry as whole. Nurses, doctors, radiographers and so on will have the ability to engage their employer alone, not together with other Government workers whose interests and job situations may be different from theirs.
Nurses
We foresee health staff salaries and working conditions improving as a result of the presence of the commission. This must bring industrial harmony too.
The aligns nicely with the work that Government is already doing — paying health staff well, building new clinics and hospitals, building houses for workers at their work stations, equipping health centres and improving the stocking of medicines and consumables. This must be intensified in the interests of national development.
Online Reporter