Over 4,000 doctors of the Ghana Medical Association have announced a withdrawal of their services effective today, Thursday July 30.

The group had earlier on threatened to embark on the strike on July 1, but extensive negotiations with government saw the deadline being moved back by a month.

It seems still that extension has not been enough to reach a settlement, leading to the announcement for the strike.

Dr. Frank Serebour, General Secretary of the GMA told Citi News:

“What we are saying is that we did have a deadline in place which indicated that by the end of June 2015, if we didn’t have conditions of service in place we will take certain decisions that will shake the entire system. At that point the negotiations had started so we extended the deadline to today 6pm but as we speak the conditions of service has not been fully negotiated and signed what it means is that the road map is activated so it’s in force.”

“From tomorrow what is going to happen is that there will not be OPD services until next week where we will stop emergency services then the following week we clear the hospitals and then we can all go home and sleep and declare ourselves unemployed”.

The Labour Minister, Haruna Iddrisu, is singing a different tune however. He believes the doctors would rescind their strike and get back to work because they are in the business of saving lives.