A former Director General of the Ghana Health Service (GHS), Professor Agyeman Badu Akosa says the continuous negligence of supervisory duties of responsible individuals is informing physician assistants' calls to be an independent body.

According to him, the lack of engagement with the group of health practitioners in order to discuss and provide direction in their line of work is what causing the current agitation.

Prof Badu Akosa says physician assistants have been allowed to work independently for far too long.

"If you don't do supervision and you allow them to work independently, then you have a problem."

Citing a scenario, he explained that any health institution operating with the help of physician assistants should always make sure that by the end of work, these physician assistants are engaged to talk about their challenges and provided with more informed directions.

"But if you choose not to do that and you leave them to do their work, now they're sitting down and saying 'we don't need to be supervised'. But how can an assistant not be supervised?," he said on Joy FM's Midday News.

"So it's the failure of supervision that has caused that," he stated.

Physician assistants are embarking on a nationwide strike of unfair treatment claims.

The Association says the dignity of Physician Assistants (PAs) has been consistently threatened, undermined, and disrespected.

“They stopped some PA training schools, failed candidates who sat for licensing, and strangulated PA postings by the government instead of developing the profession,” the Association stated.

Healthcare services in some rural hospitals are gradually grinding to a halt following the nationwide strike by Physician Assistants.

Nurses in these facilities have been left with the difficult option of referring most cases because there are no physician assistants to attend to them.

The assistants have refused to work, and they insist that changes should be made to the health professionals’ bodies’ Act 857, to grant them the freedom to operate independently.

The National Labour Commission (NLC) has called on the disputing parties for a meeting, but the leader of the group, Anthony Asare Arkoh, says until they receive a favourable response from the Health Ministry, they will not back down.

“We’re looking at government’s posture at the meeting, if the government comes in and speaks well before the Commission then we will withdraw the strike.”

“When I say speak well, I mean the things that we’re requesting. This is a Commission, the case can linger for about one or two years, and they could be adjourning.”

“Sometimes they might come in and disregard our petitions, but if they’re about to certainly tell us their plan to meet our demands then we will call it off,” he said.