Sunyani, Sept. 18, GNA – Health workers have been urged to put patients at a high premium to push the nation’s efforts to achieve Universal Health Coverage (UHC) by 2030.
Alhaji Mahama Asei Seini, the Deputy Minister of Health, who gave the advice, said the government had prioritised safety of patients to achieve the UHC, and asked health workers to work in that regard.
Patient safety, he added, remained a key intervention of quality healthcare toward achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals three of attaining high quality healthcare of all by 2030.
Alhaji Seini said this when he addressed the opening session of the 2022 conference of the fourth National Patient Safety and Healthcare Quality of the Ghana Health Service (GHS) in Sunyani.
The theme for the three-day conference was “Advancing Patient Safety and Healthcare Quality During Public Health Emergencies” and attended by health officials, stakeholders and some representatives of Ghana’s development partners.
Alhaji Seini explained that the Ministry of Health would continue to introduce and implement several health interventions programmes through the GHS to promote high quality health services across the health systems.
These, he added, included expansion of health infrastructure development and effective use of technology, saying as an area of priority, the government would continue to invest much in the health sector and promote appropriate pro-poor policies interventions too.
“Life has no substitute”, he said, and entreated the nation’s health workers to continue to adhere to professionalism and high ethical values to promote good health and reduce the nation’s mortality rate.
Madam Justina Owusu-Banahene, the Bono Regional Minister, said health professionals and stakeholders in the health sector had sacred duty to ensure the paramount safety of patients, by ensuring right diagnosis and administration of drugs.
She said failure to identify sub-standard and poor-quality drugs was not an exception to causing avoidable deaths, regretting that “most patients wallow through psychological trauma as a result of disheartening attitude for healthcare professionals, which sometimes escalate the patient’s condition and subsequent death”.
“Accordingly, it behoves us as healthcare professionals not only to ensure right diagnosis and administration of right drugs, but we must resolve as professionals to reassure the patient of safety and quality in healthcare delivery”, Mad Owusu-Banahene added.
