Volta Region introduces awards for health workers

The Volta Regional Health Directorate has introduced an annual award scheme to reward hard-working staff to enhance quality healthcare delivery in the region.

The scheme is also to reward health personnel who accept postings to the remote parts of the region.

The Volta Regional Director of Health Services, Dr Joseph Teye Nuertey, who disclosed this to the Daily Graphic, said his administration had observed for some time now that morale among a good number of health workers in the region had gone low.

This, according to him, is because the region has a lot of rural and hard-to-reach areas which require the services of health professionals.

“So naturally, if people suffer to go to such remote areas and nobody recognises them, they get demoralised,” Dr Nuertey said.

The institution of the awards, he said, was a means of reaching out to those health workers and making them know that they had not just been dumped there and forgotten but that society valued the services they were providing to the people in those areas.

  Rekindling spirit of hard work
He expressed the hope that with the institution of the award scheme, the spirit of hard work among staff of the health directorate would be rekindled.

The first awards, he said, which were given out at the end of the annual performance review of his outfit in February, came as a major surprise to those who won them because they had not expected anything of the sort.

The awards would now become an annual routine which would be replicated at the district level, he added.

For now, he said the various district directors had been tasked to monitor, recommend three persons and send their names to the regional directorate for screening to enable it to select a potential winner.

  Decrease in mortality
Dr Nuertey expressed optimism that increase in performance would result in a reduction in mortality levels in the region and by so doing,  it will boost life expectancy and productivity among the people in the region.

However, one challenge that remains to be addressed, according to Dr Nuertey, is the tendency of some health professionals pleading for their postings to be changed.

“If they don’t want to go there, then who do they expect to go there?”, he queried; adding that if another person accepted the posting and went, “then we will have to reward that person”.

  Vision
His vision for healthcare delivery in the region is to make the Volta Region the region of choice as far as healthcare delivery is concerned so that it will come to a time when healthcare professionals all over Ghana will relish the opportunity of working in the Volta Region.

  Writer’s email: [email protected]

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