Help develop policy for community health services — Segbefia
The Minister of Health, Mr Alex Segbefia, has called on stakeholders in health to support the ministry to develop a draft policy for the community-based health planning and services (CHPS) to provide easy access to quality health care.
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According to him, access to good healthcare services would not only improve the quality of life of Ghanaians but increase their ability to contribute their quota to the country’s development.
The policy, when introduced, he said, would strengthen the Ministry of Health (MoH) and its service delivery agencies to provide the needed leadership and implementation process for health delivery.
Mr Segbefia made the call at a stakeholders’ forum in Accra on the theme: “How to accelerate the scale-up and service delivery improvement of CHPS towards universal health coverage.”
The programme, which was organised by the Cabinet Secretariat, was to highlight various processes to strengthen policy-making and understand how its resources would be better deployed to assist the MoH and the Ghana Health Service(GHS).
Participants in the forum were policy makers from the ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs), members of key parliamentary select committees, civil society organisations, individuals with vested interest in improving maternal and child health, among others.
The forum was supported by the UK Department for International Department (DFID).
What is CHPS?
The Community-based Health Planning and Service (CHPS) is an initiative by the government to improve maternal and child health and accelerate progress in the reduction of maternal mortality in Ghana.
Before CHPS was used as Ghana’s strategy for decentralising the national health system, it was piloted in Navrongo in the Upper East Region .
In Navrongo, a Community-based Health and Family Planning (CHFP) initiative was established to decrease high infant mortality and high fertility rates.
Mr Segbefia said the CHPS strategy was a breakthrough in enhancing community involvement and ownership of primary healthcare intervention towards achieving universal health coverage.
However, he said, the CHPS was fraught with several policy and systems challenges such as the lack of a clear policy direction, as well as planning and budgeting at the national, regional and district levels.
He said he was hopeful that the policy would help achieve the health-related millennium development goals in Ghana by effectively reducing child mortality rate, improving maternal health care and combatting HIV/AIDS and other major diseases.
Challenges
The Director of Policy, Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation of MoH, Dr (Mrs) Afisah Zakariah, said about 77 per cent of CHPS compounds were not in good condition and some demarcated zones did not have active volunteers to contribute to the service.
Dr Zakariah said the challenges in terms of accommodation and amenities had resulted in many community health nurses not residing in the CHPS zones.
“Community health service delivery is essential to timely access service delivery hence the need to strengthen CHPS to improve health care,” she added.
Cabinet’s perspective
The Secretary to the Cabinet, Mr Roger K. Angsomwine, said issues related to maternal and child health were critical for the government.
Through the forum, he said, Cabinet would track the implementation of decisions to improve health care, especially for maternal and child health.
