Joint Health Sector Unions (JOHESU) and Assembly of Healthcare Professional Associations (AHPA) have condemned the involvement of team of physicians by the Federal Ministry of Health (FMoH) in the negotiation of the welfare and accruing benefit packages of their members.
In a statement made available to BusinessDay by the acting national secretary of the associations Matthew Ajurotu, the health organisations stated that such aberrations usually manifest at times of trade disputes when the Minister of Health would lead teams made up of high number of physicians to the negotiating table on matters relating and pertaining exclusively to members of JOHESU and AHPA.
The statement reads: “We put on record that JOHESU/AHPA has continually protested this development informally and amplifying the position by submitting that JOHESU/AHPA members are not in any way involved in the welfare negotiation of physicians under the template of NMA/NARD.
“In the interest of industrial harmony in our sector and an overriding national interest, we never documented our position particularly because our beloved health sector has been under perennial strike and entropy.’’
The organisations in the statement also claimed that the FMoH in recent years have been using directorate of hospital services and its retinue of officials to truncate the aspirations of their members.
It explained that the most recent of these tendencies manifested in 2018 at the National Industrial Court of Nigeria (NICN) inspired Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) mediations between the Federal Government and JOHESU/AHPA when a serving director of hospital services and his immediate predecessor jeopardised the adjustment of CONHESS.
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“In more contemporary times, the incumbent director of hospital services has continued where her predecessors stopped by energising the subversion of our prime demands as witnessed in the long and winding sessions of the Technical Committee set up on the adjustment of CONHESS.
“The JOHESU/AHPA has critically appraised this situation and we have strongly resolved to put a halt to it as it epitomises a travesty of justice and outright denigration of our rights to fair hearing as to continue to rely on the unproductive systems instituted by the FMoH in the quest for value addition in our reasonable service to consumers of Health in Nigeria,” it said.
JOHESU/AHPA in the statement demanded that the directorate of human resources and the directorate of legal services which are the ideal templates to negotiate personnel matters and get legal direction when necessary, must henceforth constitute the chunk of those who negotiate the welfare demand in trade
“In the event that the Federal Government and its proxies will need professional inputs in the course of negotiations with JOHESU/AHPA, we demand that moving forward, only a team comprising of the requisite and appropriate health professionals who must be non-physicians will be acceptable to us in future negotiations,” the groups further said.
In another development, JOHESU/AHPA urged the Federal Government to pay withheld April and May 2018 salaries to its members before December 31, 2021.
