The Director of Health Promotion, Dr Dacosta Aboagye, said following the COVID-19 pandemic, the importance of risk communication could not be overemphasised to ensure accurate and timely information for public safety.

“During outbreaks, we are the first on the ground, we need to help people with the information, ensure that people are safe and prevent further spread and an emergency fund for risk communication will ensure efficient communication, education and community involvement during times of crisis,” he said at a training last Friday for selected journalists on rumour management and vaccine acceptability during public health emergencies.

The session was to equip the media with the necessary knowledge and skills to effectively communicate public health messages, address misconceptions and contribute to the overall acceptance of crucial interventions, such as vaccine uptake.

Dr Aboagye noted that Ghana’s failure to implement the Abuja declaration of committing 15 per cent of its annual budget to health called for innovative ways to fund public health emergencies.

“Now is the best time to plan how we can find risk communication for health outbreaks and we are engaging government on new ways through which we can fund these interventions.

So for instance, we are engaging government to see whether we can leverage the tobacco, alcohol and sugar tax which has been passed recently for excise duty, and once that is accepted we can have dedicated funds for health promotion and prevention and that will feed into risk communication and community engagement,” he stated.

Touching on the COVID-19 levy, the Director stressed the need to hasten in getting rid of it or converting it into a public health emergency fund by cautioning that the disease was still around.

“We still have the disease around, we are still buying vaccines because we have mainstreamed it now into our routine vaccination and we also need to make sure we have attained herd immunity along the population and once that is achieved we can consider what to do, so we need to ease slowly,” he urged.

The Coordinator for Risk Communication at the Division, Mr Joel Abekuliya, indicated that in light of building resilience in the health system in anticipation of a future outbreak, the Division had instituted risk communication committees in 135 districts across the country.

“Next year, we hope to increase these committees to cover all 216 districts of the country to effectively respond to any health emergency.”

Mr Abekuliya urged the journalists to always cross-check their facts with health experts during outbreaks so as not to contribute to rumour mongering and mistrust in the health system.

“People take and process information differently during outbreaks we the media must always act in the best interest of public health and safety,” he advised.