GHS urged to ensure good customer care

The Ghana Health Service (GHS) has been called upon to increase education on good customer care, which should include sensitisation on the Patients’ Charter to ensure improved health care delivery for clients.

This customer care education must be targeted at workers at records section of health facilities since clients were mostly dissatisfied with their services, especially those related to services such as health insurance card acquisition and retrieval.

These formed part of recommendations of a study, released in Tamale, which assessed clients’ satisfaction with services they offered them at health facilities across the country.

The study, which was conducted by SEND – Ghana, an NGO, assessed client satisfaction with services offered them at health facilities across the country, and it covered 2,026 clients, who visited health facilities across the country within the last 12 months.

The study found out that majority of clients were happy about the behaviour and attitude of health workers towards their needs, but some were not happy at the attitude and behaviour of workers at the records section, as they were slow in attending to their needs and sometimes demanded unapproved payments from them.

Mr Richard Bekyieriya, Field Officer of SEND – Ghana, who presented the study at a policy dialogue in Tamale, said “In this era of Information and Communication Technology, it is extremely important for facilities to use electronic recording systems to simplify and fast-track the process of registering or retrieving cards, most especially for NHIS subscribers to reduce waiting periods.”

Mr Bekyieriya called on stakeholders to work to raise awareness on the Patients’ Charter to educate patients on their rights, roles and responsibilities to demand from government and health workers quality health care services.

Mr Anthony Sopaal, former Training Coordinator at the Ministry of Health/GHS said issues of maldistribution of health workers to deprived facilities, interference from higher authority regarding posting of health staff and delay in reimbursing NHIS clients to health facilities would be addressed for better services delivery in the health sector.