Ghana Parliament meets CSOs on health improvement
The Parliamentary Select Committee on Health on Wednesday met with the Ghana Coalition of NGOs in Health to discuss the best approach to improving health care delivery in Ghana.
Issues discussed included health care financing, tracking and analyzing the national budget and the problems and challenges existing within the health sector.
Mrs Cecilia Lodonu-Senoo, Executive Director of Hope for Future Generation, said civil society organisations (CSOs), who were on the ground and knew more about the health problems of the people, needed to liaise with legislators for support and funding of some programmes.
She said more needed to be done in order to meet the Millennium Development Goals with regards to health care delivery in the country.
Mrs Lodonu-Senoo said CSOs would conduct research, monitor how resources were allocated, ensure health service provision and effective utilisation of resources should be a priority.
She said CSOs could easily identify and champion the cause of sectors under health that were not catered for due to unavailability of resources.
She said it was important to track the budget to know how much was going into other sectors and whether government was fulfilling its promises.
Mrs Lodonu-Senoo said health financing provided the resources and the economic incentives that were used for operating the health system.
She said annual budgets were rolled from the medium-term expenditure framework, especially at the national and sectorial levels where such frameworks existed.
Mrs Lodonu-Senoo identified some challenges such as bureaucratic manipulations which sometimes made it difficult to get things done on time.
She said the Budget Planning and Preparations Unit of the Ministry of Health was handicapped in terms of skill portfolio and numbers.
This made it difficult for the MOH to prepare budgets which have clear links between policy priorities and available funds which affected the ability of the MOH to defend such budgets, she said.
Mrs Lodonu-Senoo said capacity for budget planning and preparation, disbursement and planning as well as coordination of investment expenditure seemed quite weak.
Mr Joseph Yeleh Chireh, Chairman of the Committee, called on them to collate their facts so that the Committee would be in a better position to make some input and help address the problems.
Source: GNA