King’s Medical Centre in distress due to non-payment of NHIS claims
King’s Medical Centre, the only hospital in the Tolon and Kumbungu districts in the Northern Region, will fold up in two weeks’ if the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA) does not reimburse the facility with claims it has submitted to the Authority for over 11 months now.
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The NHIA owes the facility, which is a member of the Christian Health Association of Ghana (CHAG), over GH¢1.5 million for services it had provided to the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) card bearers.
Consultations
Last Friday, a three-member management team of the hospital led by its Chief Executive Officer, Rev. Benjamin Owusu-Sekyere, was in Accra to inform the Executive Director of CHAG, Mr Peter Yeboah, and his team about the situation at the hospital.
In an interview with the Daily Graphic in Accra last Friday, Rev. Owusu-Sekyere said management was doing further consultations to facilitate the release of the money to avoid a possible closure.
Poverty
The chief executive said he feared the worst would happen if the facility was closed down because of the high levels of poverty in the catchment area.
“Gradually, the health system in the whole area is going to collapse if we are to close down because we are the only referral centre in the two districts,” he explained.
Rev. Owusu-Sekyere, who is an Assemblies of God missionary, said over 98 per cent of the people who visited the hospital were NHIS card-bearers.
“When we established the facility, we realised that many children were dying from preventable diseases and illnesses because the people could not afford to go to hospital for medical attention.”
“So, the medical centre undertook to register all the children in the area (totalling over 33,000) to enable them to seek treatment in the hospital,” he indicated.
The Director of Finance at the hospital, Mr Kwesi Addo Siaw, who accompanied the CEO, added that the situation was making it difficult for the facility to continue to motivate staff to put in their best and appealed to the NHIA to, “pay us what we have worked for because people depend on us”.
Challenges
The Executive Director of CHAG, Mr Peter Yeboah, said the NHIS was becoming a barrier to affordable health care.
“The imminent closure of the King’s Medical Centre is not only regrettable but evidence of the imminent collapse of the health system in the area if the situation is not immediately salvaged,” he said.
The Deputy Executive Director of CHAG, Dr James Duah, explained that the CHAG was pro-poor and it had never been its intention to withdraw services.
“We, therefore, call on the NHIS to do what it can to pay our facility for the services rendered,” Dr Duah, a former Medical Director of the medical centre, stated.
