By
Christabel Addo/Rita Adjeley Adjei, GNA
Accra, Sept. 27, GNA – A two-day international
conference to discuss sustainable resource allocation policies for Low and
Middle Income Countries (LMICs) opened in Accra on Thursday.
It was on the theme: “Setting Priorities
Fairly: Sustainable Policies for Effective Resource Allocation.”
The collaborative event by the International
Decision Support Initiative, the Health Technology Assessment International,
and the Ministry of Health, sets out to address the difficulties that LMICs
face with the attainment of Universal Health Coverage, and how to navigate
inconsistent and dwindling healthcare funding.
It will put the spotlight specifically on how
Health Technology Assessment; the measurement of any added value of a new
health intervention compared to existing ones, can provide solutions.
Mr Kingsley Aboagye-Gyedu, the Deputy Minister
of Health, said at the opening of the conference that prior to the adoption of
the Health Technology Assessment (HTA), Ghana’s selection of essential
medicines had been done in a relatively systematic way using clinical
evaluation alone.
He said Ghana had now incorporated HTA
recommendations in the Standard Treatment Guidelines and Essential Medicines
List because of the usefulness of the tool to assuring value-for-money from the
design and management of benefit packages to the determination of reimbursement
list of medicines, as well as price setting mechanisms.
The National Health Insurance Scheme, he said,
was also a real logical beneficiary of its positive impact on the country’s
health system.
Mr Aboagye-Gyedu described the HTA as a
systematic evaluation of properties, effects and impacts of health technology
through a multidisciplinary process that evaluated the social, economic,
organisational and ethical issues of a health intervention.
He said the main purpose of conducting an
assessment was to inform policy decisions on medicines, medical devices,
vaccines, procedures and systems developed to solve a health problem and
improve quality of life.
“I believe that if we could apply this
priority setting mechanism to selection of medicines we could go to the next
level of using it to support our National Health Insurance Reforms.”
Mr Aboagye-Gyedu acknowledged the support by
the International Decision Support Initiative (iDSI) on Ghana’s pilot study on
cost-effective management of hypertension, gearing the country into a real
policy momentum to entrench HTA into the selection and pricing processes.
In this regard, he said the policy direction
of the Ministry was to establish technical expertise for HTA to meet health
system demands, establish protocols for benchmarking for its development and
use, facilitate its application among other things to optimise its uptake in
all relevant decision making processes.
Professor Kalipso Chalkidou, the Director of
iDSI, said the event would facilitate learning and networking among the almost
100 representatives from across sectors in Africa and Europe.
He indicated that under the leadership of the
MOH, the iDSI had been working with a variety of Ghanaian entities for several
years, providing technical assistance and facilitating capacity building for
evidence informed priority-setting, to support the tough decisions and
trade-offs by government.
Prof. Chalkidou expressed the hope that ideas
and recommendations stemming from the conference would spur development and
innovation within the sub-Saharan Africa Region.
Mrs Martha Gyansa-Lutterodt, the Director of
Pharmaceuticals, MOH, recounted how the use of the HTA facilitated effective
selection of essential medicines to address the key needs of the population, to
address the high disease burden of communicable and non-communicable diseases.
She said other benefits of the HTA had been
its key role in addressing issues on procurement, financing and research for
the effective and sustainable implementation of the NHIS.
GNA