From Michael Boateng, Abesim
The Health Accounting Staff Association of Ghana (HASAG) has noted that Ghana needs to do much to improve effective delivery of health care in the country if the targets set for the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) four and five is to be attained.
According to HASAG, there were still challenges impeding effective delivery of health care in the country which must be addressed.
According to the association, though significant improvements had been recorded in the implementation of the two critical goals, that is, reduction in child mortality and improvement in maternal health, the “country is far from achieving the target by 2015”.
Mr. Justice Ahorlu, HASAG President, made observation at the opening session of the 5th Annual Conference of the HASAG, which is underway at Abesim, near Sunyani.
He stressed that management of the health sector, among other interventions ought to strengthen the health systems to serve as a catalyst to the timely attainment of the health related MDGs as well as improving the health and life of all Ghanaians for increased productivity.
“Until these bottlenecks are addressed, the attainment of these laudable goals will remain a mirage and the health sector will have done a great disservice to the people of Ghana”, he observed.
Mr. Ahorlu emphasized that health finance professionals played critical role to facilitate achievement of the MDGs as the quality of financial management had very serious implications for building strong health systems.
According to him, in all areas of health care delivery, both preventive and curative, health accountants and internal auditors provide the needed financial platform which is very vital to the performance of health professionals.
Mr. Ahorlu observed that health care financing in the hospitals in particular had radically changed over the last decade with the introduction of the National Health Insurance Scheme.
The implementation of the scheme, he noted, had come with several challenges amongst them are the absence of robust ICT platform to manage the financial information system and churn out relevant information at real time as well as plug all the loopholes in the manual system.
The three-day conference is on the theme “the role of health finance professionals in strengthening health systems”. Mrs. Ramatu Ude Umanta, Director of Finance, Ghana Health Service (GHS) said the service generated total revenue of about GH¢462.8 million in 2012, with development partners contributing GH¢199 million towards specific programme activities and GH¢11 million towards the health budget.
She said currently the GHS employed about 1000 accounting staff, an indication that on the average each staff in the year 2012 managed about GH¢462, 800.
Mrs. Umanta emphasized that the GHS had put in pragmatic measures to tackle the issue of fraud in the service stressing that culprit would be prosecuted.
Among many of these measures, she said is the introduction of a system of resource tracking to monitor the utilization of programme funds to the last cedi.
She disclosed that a computerized accounting system would be introduced in the regional medical stores and pilot it in a number of districts.