StA & GIZ launch preventive healthcare project

A project aimed at reducing the incidence of preventable diseases among employees, their dependents and members of the general public has taken off.

Dubbed; “Prevention is better than cure," the project seeks to shift the focus of public and private health delivery from the existing curative-oriented system to an integrated system which provides preventive measures as well.

It is the brain child of the Strategic Alliance (StA) and the Ghana Association of Quasi Health Institutions with support from the Deutsche Gesellschaft fur International Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH.

The Strategic Alliance comprises the Ghana Community Network Services (GCNET), Golden Star Resources, NMS Infrastructure Limited, Sysmex, Nationwide Mutual Health Care and Claron Health.

These companies work towards promoting health beyond the workplace and implementing sustainable ways of addressing the health needs of staff to enhance productivity.

They also extend preventive health services to the general population which enhance corporate image and increase the scope of their operations.

The development partnership between StA and GIZ is part of the Private Public Partnership programme that GIZ is implementing on behalf of the German Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).

Through the partnership, the organisations aspire to integrate and apply prevention and health promoting measures into the service packages of both public and private health service and health insurance providers in Ghana.

The preventive health package will complement the curative services being offered currently by healthcare and insurance providers to improve care provision and to address the health and social protection needs of staff of partnering companies, their families and the general population.

Speaking at the launch and stakeholder inception of the ‘Prevention Is Better Than Cure’ project on Wednesday, the Director, Policy, Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation Division of the Ghana Health Service (GHS), Dr. Erasmus E.A. Agongo, said the partnership with the GHS was critical since the GHS was responsible for providing health care delivery in the country.

According to him, health is both a cause and effect issue and to ensure sustainable development and productivity, a healthy population or workforce was required.

And in this regard, he said a sustainable health system was therefore needed for a compressive healthcare delivery.

Dr. Agongo observed that the Ebola outbreak in the West Africa Sub-region brought to the fore the fact that heath is a security and development issue, and stressed the need to integrate the various services including curative and preventive to ensure a healthy population that will reproduce itself to promote sustainable development.

He said the survival of children beyond the age of five (5) gives indication of a country’s level of development, likewise the reduction of maternal and infant mortality, noting that the ‘prevention is better than cure’ project, will ensure that preventive health will be incorporated into the healthcare system in the country.

He also bemoaned the fact that non-communicable diseases have overtaken communicable diseases as the leading killer in the country.

That, he observed, could be reversed if attention was paid to preventive rather than curative care.

Team Leader developpp.de Ghana, Mr. Hartwig Michaelsen, noted that Ghana and Germany have enjoyed a long standing relationship and that relationship laid the foundation for the partnership with the StA on the initiative.

According to him, the project would take the employees’ wellbeing one step further with the objective to balance curative care and preventive care for the employees, their relatives and the general population.

Mr. Michaelsen intimated that GIZ was open to more institutions joining the partnership which currently has 7 partnering companies.

He said the ultimate goal was to scale up the programme to be able to reach out to the wider Ghanaian population.