The Chief Executive Officer of the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission (FWSC) George Smith-Graham has stated that his outfit will ensure that all the errors that have come up as a result of the implementation of the new public and civil servants pay policy will not resurface with the migration of health workers unto the Single Spine Salary Structure. He said the health sector which employs over 68,000 people is one of the huge sectors to be migrated unto the SSSS; “it is a very complex area,” he admits. Speaking on Joy FM’s Super Morning Show on Tuesday, Mr Smith-Graham assured health workers “we will make sure this time we will do a thorough check. We have learnt a lot of lessons from the teachers and I think we will do a good job”. He said the individual professional groups within the health sector are many, a situation which he believes has made the migration process very cumbersome. Mr. Smith-Graham said “I remember when we were meeting the unions and the various associations on the issue and concerns. [In] the health sector alone, we met not less than 20 different groups and almost every day, other groups will still be [coming] and everybody wants you to attend to them separately.” He stated that the FWSC has been engaging all the groups and the management of the Teaching Hospitals and the Ghana Health Service after which they will meet the groups who will now categorise themselves into three main groups; that is Nurses , Doctors and the Health Workers Unions. He disclosed that payroll officers in the sector will be trained next week on the nitty-gritty of how to grade their workers before the migration begins. “Our main focus is now on the health civil service and the tertiary institutions,” adding “we are hoping that the health civil service will be on [the SSSS] in August.” He assured teachers who are calling on the FWSC to pay their salary arrears to expect it in September. He said paying the arrears in September will give some respite to parents who have to pay school fees and deal with other financial issues. Touching on the reason behind the widespread errors in the migration of teachers unto the SSSS, Mr. Smith-Graham stated that the FWSC did not have enough time to carry out a test run as the teachers were pressurizing government to effect the migration process. He said because they failed to do the test-run, some professional teachers were lumped together with non-professional teachers on the same grade which should not have been the case. The FWSC quickly corrected the anomaly, he indicated, insisting, this made it possible for the institution to clear about 20,000 names who were on the pay roll but not in the service any longer. According to him the FWSC has so far worked on 44 institutions and about 68% of the total number of employees in the public and civil services. To him, the pressure from the public shows that people have embraced the SSSS and that what is important is for the FWSC to absorb the pressure and use it positively to finish the process. He said a lot of critical thinking goes into the migration process because each institution comes with its own complexities and therefore must be handled with a different process so as to avoid the anomalies that arise. Story by Derick Romeo Adogla/Myjoyonline.com/Ghana