Dr. Patrick Atobrah, the acting Medical Director of the Upper East Regional Hospital, Bolgatanga, has said five out of the 10 doctors in the facility have plans to go for further studies, which would affect healthcare delivery.
The 10 doctors, including three from Cuba, offer services to a population of about 2.6 million people in the Region, and takes referral cases from facilities within the area and some parts of the Northern Region.
Dr. Atobrah disclosed this at the opening ceremony of the Hospital’s two-day Performance Review for 2017, which is an avenue for staff to share experiences and chart the way forward.
He said the period under review had not been easy, adding “In the past few years, we have lost two surgeons who had to upgrade their skills at the Ghana College of Surgeons. We also lost our gynaecologist to another institution, so virtually our level of human resource has been going down.”
Dr. Atobrah said the Pharmacy Department was under-staffed causing congestion as clients had to wait for long to be served, and that compelled the Hospital to use part of its internally generated revenue to engage more professional hands to assist.
He said the initiative had reduced the finances of the Hospital, adding; “Our finances have been very much hit by these expenditures outside the direct expenditure for the patients”.
Mr. Joshua Abanga, the Deputy Director of Nursing Services, in an interview with the Ghana News Agency, urged nurses, especially Community Health Nurses, to follow-up on health cases such as Tuberculosis (TB) and the Human Immune Virus (HIV) in the various communities instead of waiting for the patients to come to them.
“We have been given a target of about 2.7 million out of the population to screen for HIV and send for treatment. If we want to sit down in our comfort zones and wait for the people to come, we can never meet our target of 90-90-90 by the year 2020, we have to go to the people,” he said.
Mr. Abanga called on all health facilities in the country to intensify screening exercises at their various entry points.
“We need to do a lot of screening for both TB and HIV. On the part of TB clients, we have to direct them to the laboratory. We should not just screen them, detect the cases and allow them to go home, we will not be meeting our target of 90-90-90 for HIV if we want to go this way,” he said.
He advised the nurses to be of good behaviour to patients, adding that measures were being put in place to discipline nurses who disrespect clients at the facility.
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Source: GNA
