NHIA to roll out capitation to three other regions

National Health Insurance Authority will by the end of June extend the second phase of the capitation programme to Upper East, Upper West and the Volta regions after the pilot phase in Ashanti Region. The exercise, which will be under Ministry of Health supervision, will take on another set of regions till the whole country is covered.

Taking her turn at the “Meet the Press” series organised by the Ministry of Information in Accra, Ms Sherry Ayittey, outgoing Health Minister explained that the introduction of capitation was not punish any group of people but to clear the system of corruption and “the pilot has proven successful in achieving that”.

She noted that health care utilisation of the NHIS rose from 16. 6 million in 2009 to 27.4 million in 2013. The Health Minister said NHIA in 2013 paid GH¢ 748 million as claims as compared to GH¢ 362 million in 2009 and explained that the growing utilisation of services under the scheme is overstretching the financial status of the policy.

She commended Food and Drugs Authority (FDA), Medical and Dental Council and the Pharmacy Council for their hard work in improving service delivery to Ghanaians and called for all to make good use of the limited resources.

The FDA she said has successfully completed WHO Regulatory System Assessment, designated as the Regional Centre of Excellence for medicine registration by NEPAD and has been accredited as ISO 17025 compliant by ACLASS of the USA among many other achievements.

She encouraged FDA to do more training of regulatory staff and exposure to international best practices to enable them deal with effectively with the issue of counterfeit medicines.