Paga (U/E) Oct. 26, GNA – The Youth Harvest Foundation Ghana (YHFG), a youth focused Non-Governmental Organisation has organised a training workshop for nurses and midwives on Adolescent and Youth Friendly Health Services (AYFHS) across two Districts in the Upper East Region.
The health professionals, who were drawn from the Talensi and Kassena-Nankana West Districts of the Region, were taken through the concept of adolescents, counselling, adolescent nutrition, sexual and reproductive health challenges of adolescents, barriers to health care services of adolescents among others.
Ms Khadija Hamidu, the Sexual Health Education Advocacy Project Officer of the YHFG said the purpose of the training was to enhance the capacity of the health professionals to create conductive health facilities for delivery of quality health services to adolescents.
She said the YHFG earlier trained 23 ambassadors in the two Districts, who would be aided by the nurses to deliver some lessons in a manual developed for the five-year project of the Organisation.
The project, dubbed; “Sexual Health Education Advocacy Project (SHEAP)” was started in 2018 in Ghana, as an out-of-school Reproductive Health Education (RHE) programme component for adolescents.
The Project Officer said for effective implementation of the programme, her outfit and the GHS realised the need to train 25 nurses from the implementing communities in the two Districts.
Mr Dennis Nyaaba Asolmia, the Adolescent Focal Person for the Ghana Health Service (GHS) in the Nabdam District who facilitated the workshop, told the Ghana News Agency (GNA) in an interview that there was the need to create health conductive environments at health facilities for adolescents.
He said to ensure such friendly environments, it was incumbent for nurses and midwives to understand the concept of adolescents, and also create rapport to attract adolescents to their facilities.
He said good rapport between health care providers and their clients, would enable them to open up and freely discuss their health needs with health professionals.
“First impression is important in the delivery of every service, and so when rapport is created, especially with adolescents, it creates that enabling environment for them to open up to health care providers, and based on that, they will be able to offer them the needed help.”
Mr Asolmia said teenage pregnancy in the Region was on the rise, and “That is the basis for organising this workshop, so that we can try to reduce the indicator to a level that is appreciable.
“Nationally, we are supposed to reduce teenage pregnancy to 11.5 percent, but you will find some Districts hitting between 20 to 24 percent. This is worrying,” he said.
He described adolescents as complex people, and said they needed guidance to have self-control over their health and to make informed decisions as vulnerable people who could make wrong decisions that would affect them.
Some nurses at the end of the training told the GNA that even though the lessons taught were not entirely new to them, it was a wake up call for them to pay critical attention to adolescents in their various health facilities.
Mr Michael Asagewe, a Principal Community Health Nurse at the Wuru Community-Based Health Planning and Services (CHPS) compound said “We would put to practice the lessons learnt from this training to help our community members.”
