Government to commission and operationalise Agenda 111 project in phases

The Health Minister, Dr. Bernard Okoe-Boye, has announced that the government will commission and operationalise the Agenda 111 projects in phases.

"We will phase them to be able to commission a number of completed hospitals in phase one, operationalise them, and then move on to another batch of hospitals," he stated.

Dr. Okoe-Boye made these remarks at the opening of the 2024 Health Sector Annual Summit in Accra, which serves as a platform to assess the performance of the health sector and to reflect on its successes, achievements, challenges, and plans towards achieving an improved healthcare system for the population.

The three-day summit will discuss how the health sector can realise the Universal Health Coverage (UHC) target by 2030 and the goals of the National Health Policy (2020), which aims "to promote, restore, and maintain healthy lives for people living in Ghana."

The summit's theme is "Quality Healthcare Delivery: A Catalyst for Achieving Universal Health Coverage in Ghana."

The Health Minister acknowledged that the year had been challenging for the health sector, citing accumulated unpaid bills, uncompleted projects, irregular supply of commodities, shortages of health commodities like medicines and consumables, and the capping of Internally Generated Funds (IGF) of some agencies.

He highlighted the inadequate numbers and distribution of critical health professionals and the difficulty in attracting and retaining critical staff, especially in deprived remote areas, as a significant challenge to the health sector.

"The recent intermittent power supply has negatively impacted healthcare service delivery in Ghana. Additionally, public hospitals in Ghana are struggling to pay their electricity bills and health service providers lament that over 40 per cent of their revenue goes to paying electricity bills during their performance review engagement," he said.

Dr. Okoe-Boye outlined that the health ministry would, from this year onwards, pursue service delivery interventions using the life course and one-health approach in a whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach to delivering high-quality healthcare.

The ministry aims to build a more efficient health system capable of responding to public health emergencies with appropriate quality interventions through the implementation and monitoring of health policies.

He also mentioned that the health ministry would re-position the health workforce to address current migration issues to benefit Ghanaians.

The rollout of the E-health platform to lower health facilities, aligning with the government's digitisation drive, will be completed, he added.

"We will strengthen private sector collaboration to operationalise the newly established bio-equivalent centre, which will lead to the production and export of herbal medicine, clinically tested for efficacy in Ghana," Dr. Okoe-Boye concluded.