Sunyani Municipal Health Scheme is on course

Sunyani, Jan 13, GNA - Mr Kwame Gyamfi, the Manager of Sunyani Municipal Health Insurance Scheme, has appealed to health providers to prescribe only drugs that fall under the scheme.

Speaking to the GNA in an interview Mr Gyamfi said prescribing drugs outside the scheme had become one of the emerging problems since the scheme took off three months ago. "Patients get confused and frustrated when drugs that do not fall under the scheme are prescribed for them but are not available at the hospital's pharmacy,'' he said and suggested that most drugs under the scheme should be of generic origin. The Scheme Manager said registration for the next batch of people would begin next month and urged all who had not yet registered with the scheme to do so.

Mr Gyamfi said the municipal scheme would come out with a new software that would enable it to register people periodically instead of the original concept of registering people yearly. "People should not play politics with it, the whole thing is a matter of protecting lives, political parties will come and go but lives will always be there", Mr. Gyamfi stressed.

The Manager said the scheme needed more staff to ensure close and periodic monitoring of beneficiaries at the health care centres. Mr Gyamfi said 88,000 people representing 41 per cent of the population in the municipality had so far registered with the scheme.