Colonel Cyril Necku (rtd), Deputy Volta Regional Minister on Friday charged staff of the regional office of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), to improve on their performance or be sanctioned.
He said the office's monitoring role should be incisive enough to nudge the mutual schemes in the region into showing better results.
Col. Necku was speaking during an unscheduled visit to the NHIS regional office in Ho.
He said the "whip must be cracked, where appropriate" to eliminate non-performing individuals or institutions, cautioning that government was in no mood to see people with the mandate to manage the schemes failing in their duties.
Colonel Necku demanded that staff of the regional office should improve on their client relations.
He said too many reports about bad handling of clients were unsettling and must be reversed.
Col. Necku also expressed disappointment about reports that operational reports to the national office from the region were often late.
Mr Nestor Akototse, Volta Regional Manager of the Scheme said his office was doing all it could to meet national expectations.
He said the regional monitoring teams had been very effective, detecting operational weaknesses early enough, in many cases, before they advanced to derail the schemes.
Mr Akototse said high labour turnovers at the service providing agencies were a huge challenge for the schemes.
He said the service providers often used national service persons, who move on after a year, as a result, mistakes in record keeping keep recurring to make claims management a nightmare.
Mr Prosper Pi-Bansah, a Monitoring Officer, expressed concern about health institutions including the tertiary Regional Hospital continually reporting shortage of malaria drugs.
"This is not good enough" he stated.
Mr Pi-Bansah alleged that service providers were using fees paid to them by the schemes on projects instead using them to improve quality of
service.
Mr Andrews Gromyko and Justine Abena Okyerawa both Monitoring Officers suggested capacity building for service providers to enhance their performance.
Miss Okyerewa said a pointer to the selflessness of the monitoring team was the progressive retrieval of illegitimate payments to service providers in the region.