Okyenhene advocates laws, cost effective local waste management

technologies

Ho, Nov. 10, GNA - The Okyenhene Osagyefo Amoatia Ofori Panyin, on Friday advocated combined periodic review of laws, bye-laws and research towards the development of cost effective and appropriate local technologies to address waste management in the country. He pointed out, however, that unless the citizenry changed their attitude towards compliance to the laws, no amount of resources committed to environmental sanitation could remove the risks associated with poor sanitation.

The Okyenhene made the call at the opening of the 48 annual general meeting of the Ghana Medical Association (GMA) in Ho on the theme: "Environmental sanitation law and order and health". He said there was the need to educate the public to be aware of sanitation laws and the benefits that would accrue to them if they obeyed such laws.

"Indeed we could reduce the health risks associated with bad sanitation practices merely by providing public information on waste disposal and other practices", he said.

The Okyenhene, who was the special guest expressed regret that modernity had robbed the country of its awareness of the importance of good environmental sanitation, a norm in the early traditional Ghanaian society.

"Most of us remember the period before and immediately after independence when sanitary inspection was part of the everyday reality in the urban areas".

"It is in order to say that personal and environmental sanitation were characteristics of Ghanaians of that time.

"However, it was not all down to the fear of the sanitary inspectors. Cleanliness was part of our upbringing", the Okyenhene said. The Minister for Health Major Courage Quashigah urged doctors to break away from their traditional clinical role and become advocates of good environmental sanitation consciousness and practice in the country. "For you, advocacy in the public domain is a win-win situation. It is ultimately in direct interest of your patients, yourselves and the nation", he said.

He said rightly or wrongly society considered doctors as natural advocates on health issues.

Major Quashigah said it was important for doctors to realise that although it was their responsibility to provide quality care to individual patients in their clinical practice, closely related to that role was the impact of environment on health.

"We in the health sector are standing right on the spot to create wealth for the nation by saving the cost of treating preventable and avoidable diseases and prolonging the productive years of the nation's human capital to add more wealth to the savings to be made", he said. Dr Francis Adu-Ababio, President of the GMA said doctors were ready to accommodate the extra load associated with the implementation of the National Health Insurance Scheme.

He said it was, however, urgent to streamline documentation processes involved in implementation the Scheme. Dr Adu-Ababio said there were still problems with the registration and the long period it took for registered members of the Scheme to access services.

He conceded that the NHIS was a complex bureaucratic set-up in which leakages were bound to occur.

"However if at its inception these loopholes are not identified and rectified, client confidence in the scheme is likely to be eroded", Dr Adu-Ababio observed.

He called for pragmatic steps to streamline the registration process, establish a robust administrative set-up, engage qualified administrative staff and those found to be fraudulent in administering the Scheme punished severely.

Dr Adu-Ababio admonished those doctors who were not applying themselves dutifully to their work.

He also drew attention to "extreme egoism" which tended to make some of them unapproachable by their own colleagues and patients. Dr Adu-Ababio urged his colleagues to remember that the services they rendered to clients were "our responsibility and nobody else's".