By
Eunice Hilda Ampomah/Mariam Haruna, GNA
Accra, Oct. 9, GNA – Dr Yao Yeboah, Chairman
of the Governing Council, Ghana Health Service (GHS) on Tuesday said hypertension
is the fourth killer of Ghanaians across the country and the first killer of
patients that attended the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital.
He said the health sector concentrates higher
percentage of its national budget to address diabetes and hypertension.
He said the disorders were caused by
preventable individual lifestyles like excessive drinking of alcohol, lack of
exercises, and eating non-healthy diets.
Dr Yeboah said this during a presentation of
the GHS’s “Health Promotion (HP) Strategic Plan,” at a media engagement
workshop in Accra.
He said a lot of the country’s resources were
used in taking care of people who were sick, a step he said should be discouraged,
citing a result of a research conducted by the World Health Organisation (WHO)
that indicated that 75 per cent of all illnesses recorded across the globe,
could be prevented.
Dr Yeboah said: “We cannot totally blame the
government for not committing enough resources for health promotion, perhaps
part of the blame comes from those in the health sector who do not advocate
adequately to the government and the public for them to appreciate the
importance of health promotion”.
He noted that the GHS was committed to
ensuring that enough work was done to retrain staff of the service to make them
more focused and effective, and also ensure that budgets are rather spent on
health issues that are non-preventable than on preventable ones.
“As a state, we should collaborate in the
years ahead to ensure that unnecessary budgets are not spent to take care of
people who are sick at the expense of other areas of the economy that we need
funding for,” he said.
Mrs Grace Kafui Annan, Deputy Director of the
Health Promotion Department, making a presentation on the HP Strategic Plan
said clinical treatment services had largely influenced the under-recognition
of Health Promotion as a technical field in Ghana and other places over the
years.
She said there had been no policy direction to
guide health promotion in Ghana until 2005 when the first health promotion
policy was drafted.
However, she noted that the 2005 draft policy
had no strategic plan to operationalize it and a framework with indicators to
measure the outcomes of health promotion interventions.
Mrs Annan said the GHS in a quest to identify
holdbacks to HP programming conducted a research by examining relevant policy
documents on health promotion in Ghana and beyond; Strategic Plans and annual
reports of the Ministry of Health and GHS, the Communicate for Health project
document, and the Regional Strategy document for the WHO’s health promotion.
The goal of the research was to provide
sustained health promotion service that would contribute to improving health
and well-being in line with the health sector goal of ensuring a healthy and
productive population capable of reproducing itself safely.
Mrs Annan disclosed that only 42 out of the
254 districts had Health Promotion Officers as at 2013, and there was irregular
and inadequate monitoring and supervision of health promotion activities at all
levels in the country.
The Deputy Director said there was inadequate
capacity for health promotion for various categories of health staff as well as
uncoordinated production of Health Promotion materials and messages.
Also there was low stakeholder involvement at
district and community levels, waning spirit of volunteerism partly due to
un-equal incentive systems at community level.
Mrs Annan mentioned improved quality of health
promotion services; improved healthier communities; increased collaboration and
partnerships for health promotion as some of the strategic objectives set to
achieve in the Plan by the GHS.
GNA