The scheme is aimed at attracting and retaining staff in underserved areas.

The Director-General of the GHS, Dr Anthony Nsiah-Asare, who made this known, did not give further details, but said the package would be juicy enough to attract doctors and other health staff to even the remotest parts of the country.

He was speaking at the opening ceremony of the 18th annual general meeting of the Medical Superintendent Group, Ghana, held in Sunyani in the Bono Region last Wednesday.

It was on the theme: "Reducing the carnage on our roads: The role of hospital".

Inequitable distribution

Dr Nsiah-Asare said the inequitable distribution of health staff, especially doctors, was a source of concern to his outfit and gave an assurance that everything would be done to minimise the problem.

He said the refusal of doctors to accept posting to the five regions of the north remained a major challenge to the GHS.

He disclosed that out of 17 doctors posted to the Upper West Region this year, only three had so far reported.

“As I speak, we have placed 17 doctors in the Upper West Region alone, but only three have reported,” he stated.

The GHS boss gave an assurance that the service was working hard to address the shortage of doctors, especially in the five regions of the north.

“What is more worrying is the inequitable distribution of the health workforce, which is skewed towards urban areas, to the detriment of rural and deprived areas.

“About 48 per cent of all doctors working in this country are in Greater Accra. This is affecting the rural and deprived areas,” he told the gathering.

Dr Nsiah-Asare mentioned staffing norms, an online portal for posting, human resource gap analysis and health information systems as some of the interventions that had been rolled out by the GHS to address the challenges in the health sector.

Recruitment

According to him, more than 13,000 health professionals had been recruited and posted to public health facilities this year.
Of the number, 314 were doctors, 11,129 nurses, 442 allied health staff and 1,099 support service staff, he said.

“This progress notwithstanding, our health workforce is still not optimal. By our projection, the service needs a 105,440 workforce, as against the 75,600 that are at post,” he said.

Ambulances

Dr Nsiah-Asare stated that 307 ambulances had been procured by the government, in fulfilment of its strategic agenda of one-ambulance, one-constituency, explaining that so far 96 of them were in the country.

He added that all the 307 ambulances would be in the country before the end of the year.

The procurement of the ambulances formed part of the integrated emergency system in the country, he said, adding that they would be strategically placed in every constituency and district and be linked up to the emergency centres.

Technology and innovations health care

He said it was his vision to ensure that the GHS was driven by Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to provide excellent health services to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

“Technology and innovation today represent one of the key instruments for healthcare delivery and public health,” he said, adding that they presented opportunities and enormous potential for improving access to quality health care.
Besides, he said, technology and innovation ensured the efficient management of health resources and reduced healthcare cost to achieve the needed outcomes.

“In pursuance of this, the GHS has taken a number of strategic steps to deploy and use various innovations and technology as vehicles to drive the process towards achieving universal health coverage (UHC). One of such innovations in technology is the GHS Emergency Drone Delivery Programme,” he said.

Dr Nsiah-Asare said the emergency drone delivery programme was augmenting the existing healthcare distribution system to ensure that loss of lives due to the unavailability of blood products and essential medical commodities became a thing of the past.

He mentioned Logistic Management Information System, Human Resource Information System, Telemedicine, Tele-radiology and Tele-laboratory as the other innovations and technology that the GHS had deployed to help improve healthcare delivery in the country.

“These are expected to help the service to increase access to healthcare delivery, improve evidence-based clinical decision making, data governance for reporting and monitoring, improve cost efficiency and ultimately help attain UHC,” he said.

Road traffic accidents

Touching on the theme for the meeting, Dr Nsiah-Asare said data compiled by the Motor Traffic and Transport Department (MTTD) of the Ghana Police Service revealed that the number of people who died through road traffic accidents was 2,076 in 2017 and 2,341 in 2018, an increase of 12.76 per cent.

He said the data again indicated that deaths on Ghana's roads increased from 592 in the first quarter of 2018 to 696 in the same period of 2019, representing a 17.57 per cent increase.

He said it was estimated that Ghana spent $230 million every year treating injuries and traffic fatalities in over 5,000 reported trauma cases.