Nurses evacuated for funeral guests

Mrs. Helen Sarpong-Akorsah, South Tongu District Director of the Ghana Health Service (GHS), has lamented about the practice among communities in the area to demand that nurses manning CHPs Compounds vacated their residential accommodations for guests during funerals.

She was speaking to the Ghana News Agency (GNA) at Asidowui,near Sogakope, during the launch of the Community Mobile Health Volunteer Project (MOBIHEALTH), a pilot project aimed at enhancing mother and child health by an improved innovative use of cellular phones.

Mrs Sarpong-Akorsah regretted that the communities appeared not to have grasped the CHPS concept, as a scheme to be owned and managed by them, while government provided the tools and key staff - the nurses.

“The communities throw out the nurses from the residences they allocate to them when they are to house their funeral guests there during bereavements”, Mrs. Sarpong-Akorsah stressed.

She said even the volunteers trained to assist the nurses in care delivery had also become lukewarm, leaving the nurses stranded, having to work with apathetic people.

She said, further sensitization needed to be done to nudge the people, to help provide infrastructure and support for the CHPS compounds.

Inaugurating the new project, Mrs Sarpong-Akosah said it was an improvement over former ones, including Mobile Technology (mobitech), in which care seekers and pregnant mothers called for needed heath information in dialects of their choice, via their phones.

She said under MOBIHEALTH, volunteers, who located in the communities, would visit care seekers at home to take them through health care tips, using the supplied phones.

Mrs. Sarpong-Akorsah said an access gap was noted in the mobitech and mobile midwife projects, as some women lacked phones, or faced user challenges, or did not act on the information.

Mrs Sarpong-Akosah said under MOBIHEALTH, the volunteers would play the human intermediary between Care Givers and Care Seekers, and with the press of a button, alert the nurses of the problem in a community.

She said with a button, sub-district and district nurses could also be alerted to follow up on the local nurses for efficiency, adding that the project, which her area alone was piloting in the country, was a plus to the drive to attain Millennium Development Goals Four and Five.

“Malaria prevention and child and mother health is fast improving under the MOBIHEALTH project,” she stated.

Ms Karem Romano, Country Director, Grameen Foundation, collaborators of the project, sponsored by the US, commended the resilience of the South Tongu District, in piloting all the projects so far, to improve mother and child health.

Ms Romano said the volunteers, 25 so far, had been provided with ‘Aquatabs’, a water purification tablet at below market prices for sale to people, while phone credit top ups were being provided.