Head of the Commercial Law Department at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) has recommended a No-Fault Compensation Scheme for health workers to effectively curb medical negligence in the country.

Dr Enest Owusu Dapaa on JoyNews’ Covid and The Law Sunday, said implementation of the policy will propel honesty and transparency in reporting of medical errors in health facilities.

Thereby, finding methods to correct them and avoid repetition of similar mistakes.

According to Dr Owusu Dapaa, charging health professionals and finding them liable for negligence would not solve the real problem since defenders will only try to cover their backs.

“If we should continue to use the aggressive medical negligence integration in the country there is going to be what we call the defensive medicine.

“And defensive medicine is very difficult, and it is the natural response to what we call the medical malpractice litigation crisis because everybody will like to cover his or her backs and this will bring about unnecessary lab tests and a lot of scanning because certain things which ordinarily are not really necessary and can still arrive at a diagnosis and make some treatment [becomes a must],” he explained.

The senior KNUST lecturer further noted that the patient-doctor ratio in the country is disproportional, and logistics in various health facilities are inadequate, hence, it will be unfair to bring the same legal standard in developed countries to Ghana.

“In the circumstances that we find ourselves, for example I have some medical friends who tell me that they attend to 70-80 patients in a day, unlike developed countries where one doctor attends to 20-30 patents in a day.

“And that is a legitimate concern that is why I have suggested that we need to adopt a unique solution to the problem of medical malpractices we find in our setting,” he said.