NHIA: We’ve sped up service delivery

The National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA) has stated that the various measures it has put into place to expedite processing of health insurance cards have helped to reduce time spent by subscribers at its offices.

The Authority said the days when persons seeking National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) cards had to spend a full day, or sometimes days, queuing up at its offices will soon be over.

The Deputy Communications Director of the NHIA, Mr Selorm Adonoo, made these disclosures in an interview on Accra100.5FM’s breakfast show, Ghana Yensom, on Friday April 8, 2016.

He admitted that though the NHIA was grappling with a number of issues regarding its work, most of the challenges confronting it had been dealt with.

“We accept that there are challenges with our delivery. The link [Internet connection] sometimes goes down and we try to restore it; sometimes the link is slow, or completely cut off, sometimes unusually slow, or very fast. That’s how it works,” he explained to host Chief Jerry Forson.

He said one area of their operations which had witnessed a transformation was the provision of cards. According to Mr Adonoo, the inconvenience of waiting for up to half a year after signing up for the scheme, previously before receiving an NHIS card, especially for those who relocate in the intervening period, had been resolved with the NHIA’s introduction of the biometric registration where people now receive their cards in just a day.

“Now…you get your card instantly and then you are good to go. Hitherto, when you registered for the card, it took you three to six months to get it,” he explained.

Touching on the perennial queues at the NHIA, he said they were working to eliminate it.

“With the crowds at our offices, it has positives and it has negatives. One would say many people want to join the NHIS that’s why there is always a crowd at our offices. It is because we are working [hard]. Otherwise why will anyone come and spend a whole day there wanting to get a card? So, that is good. We are dealing with crowd management now. Largely, we have dealt with that at our offices. So, if you go visiting, I don’t think the crowd issue is as bad as it was because we’ve introduced a number of measures. We used to work from 8am to 5pm, but now some even start work from 5am, some close at 9pm or even 10pm. We run shifts for two, three streams, so, some close at 12, at 4[pm], and others at 9[pm] or 10[pm], just because we want to ensure that whoever comes gets the card before the person goes home.”

“If there’s a genuine problem, we tell them that because of A, B, or C, we cannot take care of all of them; we just take care of a certain number of people, and we tell the rest to come next day to be attended to.

“It’s a human institution and there are challenges, so, we keep communicating with the public to make sure we are on the same page regarding our operations.”