GMA Prez: I Don�t Owe My Position To The Whims Of Those Calling For My Head

President of the Ghana Medical Association (GMA), Dr. Emmanuel Adom Winful, has responded to demands for his possible prosecution and resignation following his infamous statement: �people die anyway and so if doctors� strike results in deaths, there is nothing wrong with it� by stating that he is not accountable to them. The GMA President was subjected to a verbal blitzkrieg by members of the National Democratic Congress and some social commentators who regarded his comment as indicative of the insensitivity on the part of the striking doctors, with some even calling for his resignation. The NDC Youth Committee, a youth group of the ruling party, described him as �shameless, wicked, satanic, heartless, evil, mass murderer� who needed to be tried for the deaths of innocent patients. At a recent press conference, the group asked, �How on earth can a trained medical doctor who has taken his Hippocratic Oath, open his mouth and say that people die anyway and so if innocent lives are lost as a result of the strike action, he cannot be bothered?� According to them, �Never in the history of Ghana�s medical profession has a doctor made the kind of unacceptable statement that Adom Winful made�. They wondered whether the man could convince right-thinking persons that he was not a mass murderer masquerading as a medical doctor. Ghana�s acclaimed Lord of Satire and host of �Thank God Its Friday� on Metro TV, Kweku Sintim Misa, affectionately called KSM, also waded into the fray by demanding for the immediate resignation of Dr. Adom Winful, describing his comments as �disgusting�. But the GMA in a release on Tuesday, October 18th, said the statement by its president had been misconstrued. In an interview with Shamima Muslim on Citi FM, Dr. Adom Winful, who maintained that his comment was taken out of context stressed that he does not hold himself accountable to those calling for his head. �I don�t think any of them put me at where I am�I am sorry but I don�t owe my position to their whims and caprices. I am the president of GMA and they (GMA) put me there�.that one (statement) was taken out of context�,� he said. Reacting to a publication in Thursday�s edition of the Daily Graphic that Senior Medical officers in public hospitals will earn between GH� 4,234.17 and GH�4,845.47 monthly if they are migrated onto the Single Spine Salary Structure, (SSSS), as against their present salary of between GH�3,469.53 and GH�3,970.44, Dr. Adom Winful wondered how the state-owned daily came by such pack of lies. ��Our issue is, there must be a basis for putting everybody on the grade and that is what we think must be followed�we�ve been to the council of state twice but unfortunately nothing happened�everybody is asking us to go back to work but nobody is looking at the problem. We are also concerned of what is going on�if there are reasons why it cannot be paid, come out and tell us�if anybody is appealing for us to go back to work, then concrete measures must be put in place�,� Dr. Adom Winful added.