Licensing of traditional, complementary and integrative medicine practitioners to be digitalised

The Traditional Medicine Practice Council (TMPC) has announced plans to digitalize the licensing process for traditional, complementary, and integrative medicine practitioners as part of a strategic revamp of the sector.

When implemented, practitioners will be granted unique personal identification numbers (PINs) to facilitate the assessment of their status by field registration assistants. These plans were outlined by Dr. Michael Kyeremateng, the new Registrar and Chief Executive Officer of the TMPC, when he shared his vision statement at an inaugural meeting with the staff of the Council, according to a news brief shared with the Ghana News Agency.

At the meeting, Dr. Kyeremateng emphasized the importance of revamping the operations of the Council to make it more attractive and responsive to modern challenges and opportunities in the sector.

“To ensure the efficiency of registration assistants who are mostly working in the field, this cadre of staff will be equipped with tablets to enable them to check practitioners’ eligibility to operate during their routine inspections.

"This will curb the situation where staff would call the head office to ascertain a practitioner’s status, which in some cases creates delays in accessing information to enhance their efforts at ensuring that all practitioners are licensed and their premises certified,” he said.

Among the challenges raised by some staff of the TMPC at the meeting were the lack of logistics, office spaces, furniture, equipment, inadequate allowances and salaries for contract staff, and the absence of a corporate identity. Dr. Kyeremateng assured the staff of the Council that his administration would work to improve the brand identity of the TMPC and seek strategic partnerships to improve the conditions of staff.

He announced plans by an international collaborative agency, the Edenic Management Consulting Group, based in the United States of America, to collaborate with the Council to train staff and practitioners.

The initiative, Dr. Kyeremateng said, would help to improve the skill sets of the beneficiaries to provide standard primary healthcare delivery and contribute to achieving good health and wellbeing under the Sustainable Development Goals.

“I see the Council as an excavator which does not speed, but with each staff member diligently going about their various tasks as mandated by the TMP Act, 2000 (Act 575), this excavator will speed to its destination quickly to achieve its aim,” he said.

Dr. Kyeremateng mentioned committees he had already constituted to tackle all the key areas of operations of the Council, including the corporate and public affairs committee, the international and external affairs committee, and the Information Technology Committee.

Other essential compositions, he added, include the establishment of the National Enforcement, Inspectorate, and Task Force Team and more than 4,000 Community Protection Assistants of the Ghana Police Service who will be working in each district as task force and inspectorate officers.

The inspectorate officers will be engaged in every district in Ghana to collaborate with the district officers of the TMPC in their enforcement exercises, he added.