Yaa Naa Abukari II, the overlord of the Dagbon has sent a high-level delegation to the Tamale Teaching Hospital (TTH).
The Tamale Teaching Hospital doctors have suspended emergency and OPD services.
According to a press release the doctors are demanding an apology from Health Minister, Kwabena Mintah Akandoh and Tamale North MP, Alhassan Suhuyini.
On Tuesday, the Doctors’ Association of Tamale Teaching Hospital (DATTH) announced that its members would no longer offer services at the General OPD, Antenatal Clinic, Specialist Clinic, and Paediatrics OPD.
The delegation led by Zangbalun Naa Dr. Yakubu II, Chief of the Zangbalun Traditional Area urged the Doctors of the Tamale Teaching Hospital to consider the lives that will be lost if they continue their strike action.
In a meeting with both the hospital’s management and representatives of the Doctors Association of Tamale Teaching Hospital (DATTH), Zangbalun Naa Dr. Yakubu II delivered the Yaa Naa message.
He stated, “As a neutral facilitator, will convey your concerns to the minister and engage him to take the necessary steps to address your grievances. We implore you to consider the lives and hang in the balance.
“We urge you in the interim to find a way to ensure the continuity of emergency service. We’re willing to facilitate a meeting with your representatives and the minister to discuss the way forward.”
Zangbalun Naa Dr Yakubu II appealed, “I want to appeal to colleagues that, as we are here, if there is any difficulty with our subsistence here, the ultimate place we will go to is his royal Highness, and if he is here, we have nothing to do than to accord this delegation the highest of respect, so we plead that we should all do well to take to heart the word they have for us”.
Meanwhile, Health Minister Kwabena Mintah-Akandoh has appealed to Doctors at the Tamale Teaching Hospital to call off their suspension.
Kwabena Mintah-Akandoh urged the doctors to call off the strike so that they could all regroup and strategise.
Speaking during a press conference in Accra on Thursday, April 24, Kwabena Mintah-Akandoh stated, “For the past two or three days I have been speaking to stakeholders in this sector, and please it is not everything we can put out there as leaders, I am prepared for us to come around the table and discuss whatever we need to discuss.
My humble appeal to the medical doctors and health practitioners at Tamale Teaching Hospital is that I am the first person to take care of your interests. Therefore, let us call off the strike and let us all regroup and strategise the way forward”.
He appealed, “There are some things we can do with our internally generated funds, so please, let us confront the issues as they are, it is just not sustainable for the government to keep donating equipment to Health facilities and at the end of the day when the equipment is obsolete you run back to the government for money to either maintain or replace this equipment”.
Even when we are not charging the right amount we still generate something small from these machines what happens to the money, there must be a new direction and we all group together and think through it. Maybe I am looking at it from a different perspective than we share ideas let pursue the interest of the ordinary Ghanaians”, he added.
