The Ministry of Health has constituted a National Quality Technical Committee to ensure the implementation of the National Quality Healthcare Strategy within the respective agencies of the Ministry to improve healthcare outcomes.
The Committee is drawn from the agencies of the Ministry of Health including the private sector and consumer and patient groups, aimed at providing technical leadership in driving the country’s quality improvement goals.
Mrs Tina Mensah, the Deputy Minister of Health, said this at the opening ceremony of a capacity workshop for health stakeholders in the Eastern Region to improve quality of healthcare.
She explained that members of the Committee are to identify performance gaps, set ambitious goals, and mainstream the implementation of various quality improvement plans within the respective agencies.
She said members of the Technical Committee were expected to draft an accompanying National Quality Strategy Action plan to ensure all services are delivered at high quality, and reliably oversee the implementation of the plan.
The Committee is also to define and agree on key system quality indicators and formalize the structure and management plan for monitoring and evaluation and identify capacity needs within their respective institutions.
The National Healthcare Quality Strategy was launched in 2016 with support from the Institute for Health Care Improvement, World Health Organisation, UNICEF and the Ubora Institute to serve as the standard to measure the quality of health care and its impacts on public health.
She said the Strategy outlines a plan to improve the quality of health care for all the citizenry across all levels of the health care system.
“It also to provide a framework for integrating and deploying three key aspects of quality required for optimal health system performance: Quality Planning, Quality Control/Assurance and Quality Improvement, collectively known as the Juran Tria,” she added.
She explained that the initiative was crucial because the healthcare landscape in the country was rapidly evolving with rising patient expectations for quality and safe care.
Mrs Mensah posited that, the vision of the government was to ensure that the right to health of all Ghanaians was guaranteed through an established health sector with sustainable ability to deliver affordable, equitable and easily accessible healthcare.
“To attain this national vision, the government intends to expand health promotion programmes, scale up disease prevention strategies and improve access to quality curative and emergency services, through vigorous human resource and health infrastructure development and strengthening of the National Health Insurance Scheme”.
The healthcare for every Ghanaian citizen and resident in Ghana should mean nothing than high quality and safety especially as we journey as a nation towards Universal Health Coverage.
The Deputy Minister said the Ministry was working assiduously to meet the target for the Sustainable Development Goal three, aimed to ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages, and achieve universal health coverage, including financial risk protection, access to quality essential health-care services and access to safe, effective, quality and affordable essential medicines and vaccines for all.
Dr Sodzi Sodzi-Tettey, Executive Director of Institute for Health Care Improvement, Africa Region, said the workshop would provide a deeper understanding of the content of the Strategy to the stakeholders for improve results.
He said participants were expected to develop actionable plans, outlining the way forward for agencies in alignment with the Strategy.
He commended government for playing its supervisory role in ensuring that the agencies under the Ministry of Health would implement the Strategy in an efficient and effective manner, in that the Ministry has repositioned itself to ensure that the concerns of patient were respected in the provision of quality health care.
Mr Ernest Kanyoke, Director at Ubora Institute, said the Strategy focused on maternal health, child health, malaria, epidemic-prone diseases, non-communicable diseases, mental health and geriatric care.
He affirmed the Institute’s commitment to continue to work with the Ministry to provide technical support to ensure quality healthcare in the country.
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(Via: CitiFM Online Ghana)
