Use ICT to develop health professionals : Prof. Akosa

A former Director-General of the Ghana Health Service (GHS), Professor Agyeman Badu Akosa, has observed that healthcare professionals who do not go for continuous training courses are dangerous to their patients.

“Health care is a learning industry and if you are a doctor and you don’t take part in such training programmes, your value to the patient is a suspect,” he said.

Contributing to the topic, “Capacity enhancement for healthcare professionals: The role of ICT,” at the ongoing New Year School at the University of Ghana, Legon, Professor

Akosa said considering the fact that in some hospitals there was only one doctor, ICT could be used for professional development programmes.

Professional training

He said that would prevent doctors who worked in rural areas from constantly travelling to the urban areas to attend such training programmes to the detriment of their patients.

“So, in continuous professional development, ICT is crucial to prevent creating such bottlenecks to healthcare delivery,” he said.

Professor Akosa, who is currently the Executive Director of Healthy Life Ghana in Accra, said it was crucial for every doctor to constantly undergo training in order to be on top of whatever he did.

Doctor to patient ratio
He expressed concern about the inadequate health professionals in the system, especially medical doctors, whose ratio to the patients stood at 10,000 to a doctor, and said such a situation could be addressed if enrolment in the country’s medical schools was increased with the help of ICT.

Professor Akosa said, for instance, that with the assistance of ICT, the Ghana Medical School could run a two-stream programme, where all the lecture theatres were fitted with video cameras to capture the first lectures to be replayed for students during the second lecture.

He said currently, the Ghana Medical School enrolled only 200 a year, describing the figure as “woefully inadequate” and insisted Ghana could do more than what was being done now.

Professor Akosa cited Malaysia, which had doctor to patient ratio as 1:5,000 and vowed to increase the number of doctors in the country per patients, “and in 2015, they achieved their target of a doctor to patient ratio of 1:1,700”, saying that Ghana could do same if it was serious in doing so.

He recalled how such a proposal he submitted some time ago was shot down by colleague professionals, saying that if the proposal had been endorsed, the country would have by now been producing thrice the number that the school currently turned out annually.

ICT and professional development
For his part, a lecturer of the School of Nursing of the College of Health Sciences of the University of Ghana, Dr Kwadwo Ameyaw Korsah, said the use of ICT to enhance professional development was critical and that doctors could engage in electronic prescription.

Citing an example from the United Kingdom, he said the doctors did electronic prescription where the patients were referred to pharmacies where the prescribed medicines were available unlike here where a doctor prescribed a medicine and the patient had to scout from one pharmacy to another in search of the medicine.

Importance of ICT to health care
The Executive Director of the Christian Health Association of Ghana, (CHAG), Dr Peter Yeboah, said ICT was a capacity-enhancing tool for healthcare professionals and there was, therefore, the need to encourage its use.

He said there was the need for a “folderless” system where doctors used the button of a computer to access the personal information of patients and also use it to prescribe drugs for them.

Dr Yeboah said the advantage of such “folderless” system included reduction of wastage, improvement of health care and better decision making.

He was grateful to Vibafone for making it possible for doctor-to-doctor contact free of charge.

He, however, expressed concern that 90 per cent of doctors under CHAG were in the rural areas and unfortunately all training programmes were held in Accra and Kumasi and questioned how such doctors could also improve themselves through such training.

Discussions
During discussion time, participants were unanimous that the use of ICT in enhancing healthcare delivery in the country would yield no result, if there was no reliable power supply.

They contended that ICT depended largely on electricity and that the erratic power supply in the country was a disincentive.