Ghana, South Korea collaborate on health insurance
The National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA) is collaborating with the Korean Organisation for International Healthcare (KOFIH) to address the challenges the authority faces in its efforts at delivering quality health care to Ghanaians.
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As part of the collaboration, some officials of the NHIA have been to South Korea for policy consultation and to research into how the Koreans have been able to successfully manage their health insurance scheme.
At the end of a three-day policy consultation meeting between the two parties in Accra, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the NHIA, Mr Sylvester Mensah, expressed optimism that by the end of the collaboration, both countries would see a marked improvement in the operation of their respective schemes.
The meeting marked the end of the first year of the six-year-long collaboration.
Mr Mensah thanked KOFIH for its support, which he said easily facilitated the research by the Ghanaian team in South Korea.
He said the visit had yielded fruits and expressed the hope that the subsequent years would witness even greater collaboration.
Throwing more light on the collaboration, an official of the Research and Development Unit of the NHIA, Ms Adwoa Oforiwaa Twum, said the Ghanaian team identified five areas that it could learn from the Koreans.
She listed them as information and data gathering, drugs pricing policy, quality assurance, health literacy and social marketing, as well as premium setting and collection.
Financing NHIS
Ms Twum said one critical thing that Ghana was seeking to learn from Korea was financing of the scheme, adding that while South Korea depended on 85 per cent on the premium to finance its health insurance, the NHIA depended largely on taxes.
The Deputy CEO of the NHIA, Mr Nathaniel Otoo, described the collaboration as fruitful because it was based on mutual respect and was demand-driven.
The President of the Korean Association of Public Health, Prof Soonman Kwon, asked Ghanaians to be proud of the kind of scheme the country operated, adding that his team was in Ghana to also learn about how the NHIA had been successful in paying health providers.