Korea supports Ghana’s healthcare through CHPS

A funding agreement has been signed between the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) and the Ghana Health Service (GHS) on the “Project for Improving Community-Based Primary Healthcare Through CHPS Strengthening (CHPS+)”.

The documents to seal the nine million United States dollar funding agreement, was signed by Dr Ebenezer Appiah-Denkyira, the Director General of the Ghana Health Service and Mr Woochan Chang, the Country Director for KOICA.

Mr Chang said the move was to support the implementation of the Community-Based Health Planning and Services (CHPS) strategy as a collaborative partnership between the Ministry of Health (MOH) and KOICA in the thirteen districts of the Upper East Region over a five-year period.

He explained that a Record of Discussion had earlier been signed on June 14, 2016 by the MOH and KOICA to confirm Korea’s bilateral support to Ghana in the Health Sector, and that the signing was a follow up to designate the GHS as the main implementing agency for the support.

The CHPS+ Project, he said, focuses on enhancing community engagements, improving the quality of maternal, newborn and child health services at health facilities, and strengthening health system environment.

Mr Chang said the Project aims at improving the current service at the community level through capacity building of Community Health Officers and Community Health Nurses, and further support their day-to-day operations by providing them with motorbikes for a more effective and efficient outreach service.

He said the existing Community Health Volunteer would continue to play a critical role as community health promotional agent through enhanced training, appropriate incentives, and supervision.

He said the Project also aims at enhancing and widening the coverage of the Sustainable Emergency Referral Care, which enabled community members to transport urgent cases such as emergency delivery, from their community to the next point of referral using emergency transport system such as modified motorking ambulances.

Dr Appiah-Denkyira, said the Project would equip CHPS compound, Health Centres and District Hospitals with various medical equipment and train doctors and midwives to improve their respective capacity in delivering the required services for maternal and newborn care, including safe delivery and neonatal care capacity building and provision and training of mobile ultrasound scanning service.

He said for the purpose of health system strengthening, the supervision and governance in the aspect of leadership and management would also be enhanced through capacity building of personnel in Sub- District, District and Regional Health Management Team.

Moreover the capacity for health information reporting and management from the level of CHPS compound would also be strengthened, he said.

He said the MOH and GHS has partnered KOICA in the past five years to support various areas of health, where collaboration on improving maternal and child health in the Volta Region and strengthening infectious disease response capacity were among the recent ones.

He said building on previous partnership and collaboration, the CHPS+ project would be the important milestone for a stronger partnership between the two countries in the great endeavour together for the goal of saving lives of mothers and children and improving the health of Ghanaians.