The Greater Accra National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA) has begun the registration of schoolchildren who are beneficiaries of the Ghana School Feeding Programme (GSFP) to enable them have access to free health care using the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) cards.
Those eligible for the registration are pupils from kindergarten to class six.
The Greater Accra Regional Director of the NHIA, Mr Lawrence Amartey, who revealed this in an interview, said the exercise started in May and would end this month.
The exercise, which is being undertaken by the NHIA in collaboration with the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection and the Ghana Education Service (GES), would register schoolchildren in 400 schools in the Greater Accra region.
Over one million pupils are expected to be enrolled onto the (NHIS) at the end of the exercise in Greater Accra alone, he said.
He explained that a pilot programme was undertaken in March in two basic schools, the Presby Salem School at Dodowa and the Dodowa New Town Basic “A” in the Dangme West District before it was extended to other parts of the region.
Mr Amartey explained that the exercise was part of the social intervention programmes initiated by the government to assist the poor and vulnerable in society.
He further revealed that the exercise was also to retain children in school because if they had access to good healthcare, they would not absent themselves from school.
The regional director said the children were not supposed to pay any premium or processing fee, stressing that everything was free of charge.
He said the registration exercise is on-going in other regions.
Mrs Dina Mensah, the Public Relations Officer of the NHIA, La District, said her outfit had registered schoolchildren in 10 schools out of the 14 in the district.
She noted that children who already had the NHIS cards were asked to bring them along so that those with expired cards would have them renewed while the old cards that were not biometric were also captured under the new system.
Asked whether the schools would now be visited to renew the cards when they expired, she said it was necessary that was done to ensure continued access to the healthcare services.
A visit to some schools while the registration was ongoing revealed that the children were excited about the exercise.
Miss Beatrice Awuni, a Class Six pupil of the La Wireless Cluster of Schools, said when she told her mum about the registration exercise, she was happy because she usually had stomach aches but her mum just bought her medicine from the drug store when she experienced the pain.
“I can now seek medical attention at the hospital when I have any pain,” she said.
Mrs Comfort Abban, the Headmistress of the kindergarten section of the school, said the exercise was a step in the right direction because most of the parents of the children were single parents and could not afford to pay for the medical bills of their children and that made them to absent themselves from school whenever they were ill.
She said the school used to have nurses visiting from time to time to check on the health of the schoolchildren but that had ceased.
Mrs Abban said the registration was a big relief to teachers since children would now have proper healthcare services and would report to school regularly to enhance teaching and learning.
