The Upper East Regional Director of the Ghana Health Service (GHS), Dr. Emmanuel Kofi Dzotsi, has expressed concern about the number of healthcare workers who are requesting to leave the region despite the shortage of health professionals.
“I must say that for every human resource issue that we are talking about, at least 90 percent of them are requesting to leave the region.”
Mr. Dzotsi said this on A1 Radio’s Day Break Upper East Show on May 23, 2022.
Speaking on health infrastructure, the Regional Health Director said the region is not doing badly for now.
“I must say that for the infrastructure we are not doing too badly for now. At the regional level, we have the Regional Health Directorate where we coordinate and supervise health delivery in every part of the region. As we know, we have well-endowed offices and the staff strength at the regional level is not too bad,” he said.
According to Dr. Dzotsi, the egional hospital being a referral centre lacked some specialists to attend to people who come with certain conditions that need specialist attention.
“As a Regional Hospital, we need to provide specialist care. That is where there is a challenge. As we speak now the Specialist numbers are woefully inadequate. For example, if you take Obstetric Gynecologist, the whole region we have two (2) Obstetric Gynecologists. If you come to Physician Specialist, before I came there was none but we manage to work hard and we had one (1) Physician Specialist that looks at the general medical care providing specialist care in medicine,” he said.
He indicated that human resource is also a big challenge to healthcare delivery at the district level. Nine (9) out of the 15 districts in the region have at least one doctor.
Meanwhile, speaking on the same platform, the Regional Secretary of the Coalition of NGOs in Health in the Upper East Region has sent a caution to political actors to stop interfering in health matters in the region.
The act, he says, has affected quality healthcare delivery in the region for far too long.
According to him, politicians call on health directors to ask for transfers for certain health professionals posing grave risks to residents in the region.
Source: A1radioonline.com|101.1MHz|Osuman Kaapore Tahiru|Ghana
