The Ghana Health Service (GHS) has urged Community Health Officers, (CHOs) to partner with the various Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs) to profile communities in order to provide the appropriate and effective health service to the people in those communities.
According to Dr. Andrews Ayim, the Deputy Director of Policy at the Ghana Health Service Head Office , community dynamics had to be taken very seriously in the bid to serve community members at the various Community-based Health Planning and Services (CHPS) level.
Dr. Andrews Ayim said this in Tamale when he represented the Director General of the Ghana Health Service, Dr. Patrick Kumah Aboagye, at a dissemination forum on the CHPS For Life project.
The Ghana Health Service implemented the project with support from the Japan government through JICA to strengthen the CHPS concept in the country, particularly the five regions in northern Ghana.
Regional and District Heath Directors, representatives of JICA, the Media and other actors in the health sector participated in one-day forum to assess the impact of CHPS For Life project, the challenges and the sustainability approach as the project faced out.
Dr. Ayim observed that some CHOs complained of not getting their target group of people to offer their services during community outreaches and said it was because they fail to know category of people at those community and the right service to provide.
The “C” in the CHPS is a community concept, so if a particular community has a particular concept that is what you are going to use to deliver and use as the basis of your CHPS implementation so that a community profile determines the great of service that you give. A lot of us have missed the “C” part of the CHPS”, he explained.
Dr. Ayim also encouraged the CHOs to plan their activities appropriately by targeting the right time to meet the community people during outreach programmes in the delivery of their services.
If you look at the “H” which is talking about the health planning issues, and the “P” and the “S” mean that if mothers go to market at 6am and come back at 4pm, and your work starts at 8am and close at 5pm, at 5pm that is when the children have come home. So in the process of implementing the CHPS you may need to visit the community at 5pm because that’s when they are there.
But what we have realized in what we are doing is that they go from 8am to 5pm because that’s when they come to work and come to report that we didn’t meet any children, of course the people went out so you can’t meet them but if you knew the community, you understood how they work and you understood what they do it will tell you the time of planning your visit in the CHPS”, Dr. Ayim added.
The Deputy Director also stressed the need for the CHOs to link their community health services to lessons learned from the CHPS For Life project such as the Life Course Approach in the wellness clinics to help in policy formulation for development.
On his part, Dr. Braimah Baba Abdulai, the Northern Regional Director of Health Services, observed that the CHPS For Life project is one of the greatest projects they could have which was led by development partners and its implementation led by the Ghana Health Service staff .