HO V.R. 

The final year students of the Community Health Nurses Training School here have vacated campus in protest against the suspension of four of their mates, and the poor food served by the school. 

According to Students sources, the senior prefect and her assistant together with the dining hall prefect and her assistant, were suspended for having encouraged their mates to go on a hunger strike because of the poor quality of food they were usually served. 

The students also claim that several complaints on the poor food in the school had been made to the school authorities but the quality and quantity remained the same. 

“On our return from the Easter holidays” the students said, “conditions continued to be worse and all appeals to the school authorities have not been listened to. We have no alternative but to take the steps we took,” and added that they decided to go with their colleagues, the prefects, because they acted on their behalf. 

According to a spokesman from the office of the Director of Nursing Services, Accra, all the 32 students in the final year of the Ho, Community Health Nurses Training School vacated the campus recently in protest against the suspension of four of their prefects. 

The spokesman disclosed that reports reaching the office say that the School disciplinary met after Committee some of the the students embarked on a strike action backing their demand for better and more food. The Committee decided to suspend four of the prefects because of their rudeness and their inability to control the students but rather joined them in the strike action. 

The spokesman added that no previous complaints were received from the students on the food situation in the school. 

Meanwhile doctors throughout the country have called off their two month “work-to-rule” strike action on humanitarian grounds and not on job satisfaction or material gains. 

Dr K Twum-Danso Secretary of the Ghana Medical Association has expressed the hope that nurses who are on strike would resume efforts of doctors to supplement or at least provide a skeleton staff in hospitals throughout the country while negotiations between their executive and the Salary Review Committee continue. 

In spite of the earlier call made by the Executive of the Ghana Nurses Association on all its members to call off their strike action immediately, nurses in most government hospitals and clinics were still on strike as we went to press.

 There is now a public outcry for the nurses to return to work and to this is added the voice of a group of women called “Mothers” who have appealed to the striking nurses to consider humanitarian ethics their profession and call off the strike. 

In one ward in Accra ten sick people have died. Several other hundreds may die if the strike action continues.