The Government’s decision to institute a package to motivate health workers engaged in the fight against COVID-19 is very commendable and must be supported.
Such an action, in addition to putting in place measures to reduce the exposure of health workers to the virus, will help in making these workers committed to supporting the nation’s efforts at dealing with this pandemic, even though their lives are in jeopardy.
However, such a motivational package must be properly designed and implemented, else it could rather end up demotivating many health workers who may be left out, although they qualify. It could also further widen the inequality gap as some, who are well-positioned already, will stand to benefit more than others.
There are several categories of players (employees) right from the Ministry of Health (MoH) through the largest agency; GHS to the least private health care facility. Taking a glance, for example at the employees of the Ghana Health Service (GHS), one can identify three broad classifications as follows; Curative, Preventive and Administrative staff.
There is no question/doubt about the fact that the Curative and Preventive Staff are Line Staff /Line Employees, whiles the Administrative Staff constitute staff employee. HR practitioners will agree that every organization’s employees are made up of line employees and staff employees.
In my opinion, regarding this COVID 19 pandemic, a frontline staff cuts across both line and staff employees, depending on the employees’ availability, assignment and reassignment, which we can look at later.
Basically, the curative staff are found in the clinical settings (hospitals where sick people are treated of the sickness) talk about the pharmacy staff, nurses, doctors, laboratory staff, just to mention a few.
The preventive staff are basically public health-oriented made-up of Community Health Nurses and a lot more of different categories of staff, who work to fight against preventable sicknesses/diseases, through educating the public and active case search with the aim of nipping in the bud disease of public health concerns.
It should be prudent for implementing authorities to consider, if not absolutely then, essentially the level of risk to which the staff are generally exposed to, but not based on position, grade, salary scale or qualification. This is in view of the fact that the addition of 50% salary to the frontline health workers’ salary is purely a motivational package from the Government, as a result of the employees’ readiness to work and actually working, regardless of the level of exposure to danger, in process of rendering service directly and indirectly in the fight against COVID-19.
One should therefore not forget that the OPD staff who makes the first contact with COVID-19 patients at the OPD, is not at a lesser risk than a (laboratory staff who takes the sample or the doctor etc., who follows later), and so it is with the public health officer who carries out active case search and the driver who chauffeurs both staff and samples to the testing centres.
Again, a blanket implementation of this strategy will be most unfair if we all agree that the risk levels are the same or are not, whether at OPD, Laboratory consulting rooms or on the field etc. The unfairness arises for the following reasons which I wish to elaborate with some practical example that no HR practitioner with the mindset of rewards and compensation cannot run away from.
The salary structure/scale of these workers has already been designed using all the available tools and compensable factors required. So then, taking the range from the very lowest to the very highest paid staff, the very lowest paid frontline staff receive as low as 8.77 percent of the very highest paid front line staff. Mathematically, if the highest pay is GHs2,000.00, the lowest pay is GHs175.00. Fifty-percent (50%) of both is GHs1,000.00 and GHs87.5 respectively.
This then is the true reflection of the hidden unfairness in the blanket implementation of the percentage strategy. It is my opinion that to do away with this unfairness, an absolute flat figure should be quoted to replace the current proposal. And in the event of doing this, a more stringent and accurate data is collected to ensure that the government is not unnecessarily overburdened and also, ‘what belongs to Caesar is given to Caesar’.
Written by Mark J. K. Dango, Human Resources Management Practitioner
The post Addressing the unfairness in the motivational package for frontline health workers [Article] appeared first on Citinewsroom - Comprehensive News in Ghana, Current Affairs, Business News , Headlines, Ghana Sports, Entertainment, Politics, Articles, Opinions, Viral Content.
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