GHS in the Upper East School personnel on customer care

Garu (U/E), Sept 2, GNA - The Upper East Regional Directorate of the Ghana Health Service is embarking on a regional campaign to sensitize its staff on customer care in order to attract more patients to its facilities. This has been necessitated by recent decline in patient attendance to some key public health facilities in the region following recent upsurge of private health facilities. The decline has partly been attributed to lack of customer care skills by health providers, thereby affecting service delivery and trust from the public who hitherto made public health facilities their first choice in seeking medical care. All nine districts in the region are expected to present 50 participants each to be schooled on topics such as good customer care and customer relations, patient rights and the code of ethics of the service and communication skills. At a ceremony to kick start the programmes from the Garu-Tempane District, Mr. Gaston Bozie, the Regional Health Promoter at the Regional Health Directorate, said it had become necessary to organize such programmes to sensitize staff of the service following keen competition in health care delivery in the region.

According Mr. Bozie the Regional Director of Health Services, Dr. Koku Awoonor-Williams, was concerned about the way patients should be handled in the face of stiff competition and especially when service delivery was involved.. He said the idea was also to get health staff to understand the modalities in customer care so that they could add more innovative skills in dealing with patients who patronize GHS facilities in the region.

A facilitator at the workshop, Mr. Eric Kwadjo Amoh, acknowledged that in the face of stiff competition good customer care and good communication skills were vital in boosting the trust in patients and increasing their confidence in the services they receive. He said health service providers such as doctors, nurses and medical assistants among others were well trained but needed to be schooled to handle patients as though they were offering a service worth paying for. "Like the modern services bankers offer, you need to organize yourselves in a more customer friendly manner to attract and keep patients to your facilities," he said.