National Emergency Plan halts cholera
A national emergency preparedness and response plan (EPRP) developed in 2011 has contributed immensely to staying an outbreak of cholera in the country, a Programme Officer of the Environmental Health and Sanitation Directorate (EHSD), Mr Kweku Quansah, has stated.
Advertisement
He added that the success of the plan to put at bay a cholera outbreak this year was activated through the support offered by the required personnel, adequate logistics and financial support.
He disclosed this to the Daily Graphic at the second review and validation workshop on the EPRP held at Dodowa in the Shai Osudoku District in the Greater Accra Region last Thursday.
The first review was held in 2013.
Importance of review
Mr Quansah said the review was important because issues around emergencies changed all the time and so the plan had to be able to respond to such changes and contemporary issues in such emergencies.
“As a nation, we have had a lot of epidemics in the last five years. Some were very serious, some were manageable and we have learnt our lessons and want to put some of these lessons into documents for the regions and the districts and even other countries can learn from us.
“The cholera outbreak in 2014 is still fresh on our minds when we lost a lot of lives unnecessarily which we could have easily prevented. We learnt our lessons; we went into 2015 with some vigour and although we managed, we still lost some lives,” he said.
According to him, the meeting was also intended to set the agenda for all the relevant questions to be asked and then have them documented for future lessons and sharing, so that next year the country would be able to maintain zero cholera or other such outbreaks.
“In 2016, thank God that some of the strategies we put in place worked and as I speak now from January up to this time we have officially recorded only one case and no death. We are serious about that because we want to ask ourselves what worked and what didn’t work and what we can improve upon.
“We are prepared to face 2017 with a lot of hope that we will also be able to control cholera and such outbreaks in Ghana,” Mr Quansah said.
Stakeholders
Stakeholders at the meeting who formed the technical working group of the committee included representatives from the Ghana Health Service (GHS), the Ministry of Water Resources, Works and Housing, the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development, the district assemblies, the National Disaster Management Organisation (NADMO), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the Office of the United Nations Coordinator, the Ghana Water Company Limited (GWCL) and the Coalition of NGOs in Water and Sanitation (CONIWAS).
Mr Quansah said the committee would look at how the groups at the national, regional and district levels could be strengthened “because emergencies occur at the district level and you need some minimal capacity for them to be able to manage such emergencies and it is critical for us to look at it from that angle”.
Emergency Specialists Register
The meeting, he said, was also meant to update a National Emergency Specialists Register or roster to be able to map out all those who had capacity in the country as far as emergency response and preparedness were concerned.
A humanitarian coordination analyst at the UN Resident Coordinator’s Office, Mr John Sule Mahama, lauded the calibre of people at the workshop, saying, “These are very serious people who don’t joke with what they do.”