By Joyceline Natally Cudjoe
Health professionals and
educators from Africa and beyond are attending a three day symposium in Accra
to deliberate measures for effective cooperation among health workers to
enhance health service delivery.
The symposium organised
by the Africa Forum for Research and Education in Health (AFREhealth) was also
necessitated by the need to examine best practices to prevent common disease
infections for improved health outcomes.
The symposium has the
theme, ‘Leadership and Capacity Building for Health Professional Education and
Research.”
Mr. Kwaku Agyemang
Manu, Minister of Health, who opened the symposium Tuesday, said the health
system requires strong leadership and effective governance at all levels to
ensure improved service delivery.
He, therefore, called
on health professionals and educators to provide leadership and address the
problems, saying “we cannot blame others for our non-performance.”
“Our health systems
face a number of challenges including poor infrastructure, un-integrated
information systems and the absence of comprehensive emergency services, weak
governance structures and inadequate financing of health care services also
contributes to the poor state of the health of our population,” he said.
The Minister lauded
AFREhealth for taking steps to get rid of the traditional barriers that hinder
effective workplace collaboration and cooperation among health workers, and hope that bridging
the gap would pave way for the provision of a transformed health landscape in
Africa..
“There must be a strong
collaboration and corporation between health workers because if you are to treat
a patient with malaria, you need a doctor, nurse, laboratory scientist and a
pharmacist at the minimum.”
Mr. Agyemang Manu
observed that the health sector lacked adequate health personnel with requisite
skills and the few available were concentrated in the cities and teaching
hospitails to the detriment of the majority in the rural areas.
He, however, urged
participants of the symposium to develop solutions to address challenges with
human resource, infectious disease, injury and non communicable disease among
other in the health sector.
Professor Peter Donkor,
Chairman of AFREhealth, for his part, said the
complex nature of health challenges in Africa and other parts of the
world, required a well-trained workforce
and the need for all hands to be on deck to find solutions.
He stressed the need
for all health workers to value each other’s work and collaborate to promote
satisfactory services and meet the health needs of the public.
He advised health
training institutions to review their lesson and upgrade them to meet the
changing and growing demands on patients.
Dr.Roger Glass,
Director Fogarty International Center, United States of America (USA), stated
that government must invest in the training of health workers to cater better
for patients as the wealth of a nation lies in the health of its population.
He said AFREhealth has
developed a model to scale up the training of doctors, nurses and other health
workers.
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