A lecturer at the University of
Ghana, Dr Aaron Abuosi, has described the country’s electronic health
(e-health) policy as not reflecting the needs of the people for whom it was
developed.
He said the policy’s approach in
harnessing Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) seemed to be more
about technocrats breathing down the necks of Ghanaians what they thought was
the way to go, rather than Ghanaians themselves as ultimate beneficiaries,
owning and dictating the pace of the policy.
Dr Abuosi gave the evaluation when
he took his turn at the first symposium of the 67th Annual New Year School.
The symposium was on the theme,
“Evaluating Ghana’s E-Health policy.”
Presentations
Dr Abuosi explained how developments
in the use of ICTs in the country had not been matched by an enabling
environment to harness the gains and maximise them for the health sector.
According to him, an established
enabling environment for harnessing ICTs was the ideal situation for any
country to attain international standards in the use of ICTs in health service
provision.
He said Ghana had a good ICT
infrastructure with telecommunications coverage that was nation-wide.
That, according to Dr Abuosi, was a
plus for the country’s e-health policy, making it one of the few leading
countries in ICTs on the continent.
What was lacking, however, was
strategic and coherent policies to harness such opportunities.
He said the country had to
strengthen its enabling environment for e-health by getting down to the people
and sensitising them on what needed to be done to scale up the use of
technologies which were already familiar to them.
Success
The director of research systems and information management at the Ministry of
Health, Dr Isaac Adams, said in spite of some challenges relating to funding,
the e-health policy had chalked up some successes.
He said as at the close of last
year, the country had 15 e-health initiatives based on the application of
mobile telephony.
Dr Adams cited initiatives in the
Northern Region where in areas such as the Bongo District, information was sent
to pregnant women through Short Messaging Services (SMS), thereby reducing
maternal mortality.
He said during the cholera outbreak
last year, the Keta District recorded no deaths because of the setting up of
call centres that provided immediate responses to queries on the disease.
According to Dr Adams, confidence in
health delivery in some communities had also increased because of the use of
mobile telephony to directly reach out to doctors.
Concerns
Some of the participants raised concerns about how well Ghanaians would accept
an ICT mediated medical examination and the role of mobile telephony companies
in the e-health policy.
The Vice Dean of the School of
Graduate studies of the University of Ghana, Prof. Ama de Graft-Aikins, who
chaired the session was, however, confident that the people would readily
accept the use of ICT in health service provision to
reduce the stress of travelling distances to hospitals and health centres to
wait for long hours for consultations.
Credit: Graphic
No comments:
Post a Comment