Wednesday, November 02, 2011
The need to extend the National Health Insurance Scheme to more private hospitals
By Dennis Yao Akoetey
It is said that in every misfortune, there is a blessing; a blessing some of us believe can either be explicit or implicit and must be explored.
It is therefore imperative for us as “thinking beings” to always look out for inherent opportunities in misfortunes that come our ways or make something good out of those misfortunes.
I would therefore like to discuss the on-going strike actions by our beloved Doctors in this context; the need for the state to create something out of this unfortunate phenomenon.
As we all know, the health condition of people in every nation is one of the biggest challenges faced by any government. The situation is very much pronounced in developing countries where resources are either limited or mismanaged and therefore making it difficult for various sectors of the economy to get the adequate resources needed to discharge their responsibilities of which the health sector is no exception.
It is because of this that as a nation we decided to implement the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) policy in order to make health accessibility easy for us in time of illness. As to whether the NHIS has arrived in order to adequately take care of us when we need it most is something we have to discuss as a nation dispassionately and more aggressively.
One may not be happy with the Doctors strike actions especially because of its implication on human lives but not withstanding this, some of us believe that it is a perfect opportunity for us to re-look at our NHIS to see how best we can enhance it and extend the policy more aggressively than before to more private hospitals and clinics with good standing in the future in order to cushion any possible future strike actions by Doctors.
This is because, what we are experiencing now is not only Doctors refused to work at all but only that they have withdrawn their services from the public hospitals.
And since some of these Doctors who owned private hospitals still attend to patients in their private facilities perhaps at a high fee, we can still chase them. Therefore, with the extension of NHIS to private hospitals/clinics than it is currently, in such strike actions patience will have to follow doctors and receive their treatment any way and at same cost.
I therefore propose to all stakeholders especially governments (present and future) to see how best they can undertake a deliberate and aggressive policy by legislative instrument to take the NHIS to next level where all private hospitals and clinics will be accredited NHIS facilities; this way we will not only cushion patients frustration in any eventual strike actions by Doctors but it will also help enhance the health accessibility of the citizenry.
This also means that the present National Democratic Congress (NDC) government will have to reconsider the “one time premium” policy to see whether it is still feasible or not and if it is not, government should be bold enough to carry the citizenry along and I believe we would understand; what matters is a guarantee of accessible good health care at affordable cost.
Again, it is about time governments undertakes a deliberate and aggressive policy in training more Doctors and perhaps bond them under certain agreed conditions in the interest of health development of our nation.
It means that government and medical training institutions must wave some of the strict requirements for entering into such institutions; any average science student from the Senior High School interested in doing medicine should be given the opportunity.
If we are not too sure we can at least start on pilot basis by admitting some number of average students; it is time we demystified the medical profession. Why can’t any science student with aggregate fifteen (15) with the passion to read medicine be given the opportunity to do so? Indeed, history has shown that people with problems in some subjects earlier in their studies turned out to be an authority in those subjects.
What does it take to train more Doctors especially so when we have about four public universities currently undertaking training in medicine? If as a nation we cannot take the risk of training average students in medicine in order to respond to scarcity of doctors, can we then say the black man is indeed capable of managing his own affairs especially so when it appears that we still have to follow the standard left behind by the colonial master hook, line and sinker in almost everything we do? Can’t we also do something new for others to copy? This is the time, else we continue to behave like the slave boy who dreamt of becoming a king only to wake up to see himself as slave and wished to have remained in his dream.
Let us be guided by the fact, that in this part of the world, while people can survive without a decent shelter and sometimes have to go to bed with empty stomach, when it comes to the health of the people, it must be a matter of high priority.
As we are trying hard to get the doctors back to work in the interim, let us get it straight; that what we need now is deliberate policy to train more doctors in future and also extension of a functional NHIS to private health facilities like never before.
The writer works with the Information Services Department.