Dr Benjamin Kumbour, Minister of Health, has urged health training institutions to adopt innovative ways to solve the numerous problems confronting the health sector particularly in the rural communities. He said, for instance, maternal mortality rate was high in rural areas because of a number of factors including the delay in conveying pregnant women to health facilities due to unavailability of transport. Dr Kumbour was addressing the closing ceremony of the Netherlands Organisation for International Cooperation in Higher Education (NUFFIC) Project at the University for Development Studies (UDS) in Tamale on Thursday. The NUFFIC Project, which is a Problem Based Learning (PBL) approach, was adopted by the UDS under the auspices of the Netherlands government. The PBL curriculum is spiral in nature with students and tutors always referring to topics touched on earlier in their training and expected to seek knowledge ahead of formal lecturers. Dr Kumbour also urged health training institutions to take into account the socio-cultural beliefs of people in the manner in which they handled or prescribed medications for them. He re-assured the authorities of UDS of government's continuous support to provide the University with infrastructure and logistics to enable it to function well. Professor Kaku Sagary Nakoe, Acting Vice-Chancellor of the UDS, said under the NUFFIC Project, eight members of staff of the UDS School of Medicine and Health Sciences (UDS-SMHS) had undertaken a special Masters Programme in health education with emphasis on PBL pedagogy in Egypt. He said the beneficiaries would form core resource persons in the PBL for the continuous training of their colleagues adding that the NUFFIC sponsored activities had made the UDS-SMHS more formally rooted in PBL instructions. Professor Nakoe appealed to the Minister of Health to support the UDS-SMHS to be more visible at the Tamale Teaching Hospital through the provision of administrative and staff offices. Mr Moses Bukari Magbengba, Northern Regional Minister commended aspects of the PBL curriculum, which the SMHS is implementing to ensure that students are attach to rural health centres for about six weeks in a year. He appealed to the Minister of Health to ensure that the student doctors also benefited from its educational activities saying, "This will help prevent certain health emergencies like Cerebrospinal Meningitis (CSM) that confront the North annually." Source: GNA