C’ttee to develop guidelines on quality health care inaugurated

The Ministry of Health (MoH) has set up a national steering committee to develop guidelines and standards to ensure quality in the national healthcare delivery system.

Known as the National Quality Strategy Steering Committee (NQSSC), it will be assisted with technical support from the Institute of Healthcare Improvement under the auspices of the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the USAID.
The committee will also oversee the implementation of the national health quality strategy which comprises the health quality guidelines and standards to achieve the needed national health outcomes.
In addition, the strategy will make available a framework for integrating and deploying three key quality features required for achieving optimal performance in the health system, namely, quality planning, quality control and assurance and quality improvement, collectively known as the Juran Triad.
The committee is chaired by Dr Emmanuel Odame, the Director of  Policy Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation at the MoH, and include representatives from the Christian Health Association of Ghana, private medical and dental practitioners, health regulatory authorities and health training institutions.
Other institutions represented on the committee are the National Blood Transfusion Service, the Mental Health Authority, the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA) and the Coalition of Non-governmental Organisations in Health.

Inauguration
In an inauguration speech read on her behalf, the Chief Director of the MoH, Dr Afisa Zakariah, said the committee was put together as part of the government’s plans to improve healthcare delivery.
She said the committee would seek to bridge any disparities in healthcare delivery so far as providing quality health care nationwide was concerned.
“The ministry wants to ensure that the people are provided with good health care and also make sure that no matter where a person lives in the country, he or she has access to quality health care,” she said.
Dr Zachariah said the government remained committed to improving healthcare services through agencies of the MoH, since they had historically leveraged quality planning, quality assurance and quality improvement approaches.
She said even though stakeholders, including the Ghana Health Services (GHS), the teaching hospitals and other quasi-governmental health institutions, as well as development partners in health, were already doing a lot to ensure there was quality in healthcare delivery, a lot more could be done to improve on quality and safety in health care.