Dr (Mrs) Gladys Norley Ashietey, Deputy Minister of Health on Tuesday called for development of a comprehensive Standard Treatment Guidelines (STG) that would aim at influencing medicine prescription behaviour for improved health care delivery.
Dr. Norley Ashietey said the comprehensive STGs should focus on the priority problems and also target the prescribers and dispensers to improve cost effectiveness of health care through economic and efficient use of pharmaceuticals.
The Deputy Minister was speaking at the sixth STGs meeting of experts from the medical fraternity in Accra to review the guidelines and the essential drugs list to improve patient care and health delivery in the country.
The STGs is a scientific document that shows ways of prescribing and dispensing appropriate medicine to ensure safe and effectiveness for a particular period of time.
Dr. Ashietey said there was the need to design an intervention relevant to a particular situation of a systematic cycle to improve the quality of patient care.
She noted that inappropriate prescription was a manifestation of irrational medicines use behaviour, which occurred when medicines were not prescribed in accordance with guidelines, based on scientific evidence to ensure safe, effective and economic use.
She therefore, called for interdisciplinary collaboration involving health and social science experts to ensure that medicine prescription and dispensing behaviour are improved.
Dr. Elias Sory, Director General of the Ghana Health Service said the emergence of new diseases called for a consistent review of STGs for appropriate medicine prescription to treat diseases.
He expressed confidence in the competence of the experts to come out with appropriate guidelines on treatment of diseases.
Mrs. Edith Andrews Annan, a representative of the World Health Organisation urged government to increase the number of medicines contained on the National Health Insurance Scheme's drug list for all with various diseases to gain treatment.
She praised the country for her consistency in undertaking review of STGs.