Ashanti Health Directorate receives assistance
Millennium Promise, an international NGO, has presented 1000 smartphones and other items to the Ashanti Regional Health Directorate for an e-health technical assistance initiative. The NGO also donated 1,000 bag packs and 2,500 t-shirts to the Ghana Health Service.
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Under the initiative, the tablets would be used by community health workers to register household members, as well as record their health status, provide health education and counselling, among other activities.
The Country Director of Millennium Promise, Chief Nathaniel Ebo Nsarko, made the presentation at an annual Ashanti Regional Community-based Health Planning and Services (CHPS) forum and awards ceremony for health workers in Kumasi.
It was on the theme: “Investing in e-Health Enabled Frontline Health Workers in Strengthening CHPS implementation towards universal health coverage-The Role of Stakeholders.”
Significance
According to Chief Nsarko, his organisation decided to support the health directorate to enable the latter to pioneer its paperless system in the region.
“The smartphones are used to register household members, as well as monitor their health status, provide health education, and identify danger signs counsel, after which they are referred to community health nurses at their respective areas for immediate attention,” he said.
Chief Nsarko added that the e-Health application in the phones would serve as a decision support tool for community health workers and that its supervision modules also make it easy for the performance of community health workers to be tracked.
He explained that a ‘One Million Community Health Workers’ (1mCHW) campaign launched by the Millennium Promise, had also supported capacity building and knowledge transfer in e-health and community health programmes.
According to him, 1,100 CHWs from 13 districts were trained in 2017. This brings to 1,800 the total number of trained CHWs in the region.
Appreciation
The Ashanti Regional Director of Health, Dr Emmanuel Tinkorang, expressed appreciation to their benefactor and said the directorate had decided to use telemedicine and telecommunication technologies to support and strengthen CHPS programmes and also improve referral and other health delivery services.