The Ghana Health Service (GHS) has directed all facilities under the service to provide a desk at the Outpatient Department (OPD) to assist persons with disability (PWDs).

The officers at the desk are to assist the PWDs from the OPD till they leave the facility.

The Director-General of the GHS, Professor Samuel Kaba Akoriyea, said this when he engaged the National Council for Persons with Disability (NCPD) and executives of the Ghana Federation of Disability Organisations (GFD) in Accra last Wednesday.

He said the directive, which took immediate effect, would be added to the scores of regional hospitals’ annual peer review as one of the highest scores in their annual assessment.

He indicated that he had already met with all regional directors of health services.

Explaining further, Prof. Akoriyea said the assistance should start from the OPD to ensure PWDs did not queue, and they should be seen through to the pharmacy till they leave.

He added that the directive should cover PWDs on admission till they were discharged.

The directive affects regional and district hospitals, polyclinics, and Community Health-Based Planning Services (CHPS) compounds only.

Prof. Akoriyea said to give the directive nationalistic backing, he was going to confer with the Minister of Health so that all hospitals across the country could also set up such desks to help PWDs access health care comfortably.

He said health facilities, aside from this help desk, should also have medical staff who could use sign language to help ease the discomfort that people who needed sign language interpreters went through at health facilities.

He said presently, the University of Health and Allied Sciences (UHAS) had started training PWDs and that when such persons completed their courses, they would be admitted to health facilities without hustle, saying GHS facilities should employ PWDs where they could function.

Prof. Akoriyea, who was the Chairman of the Drafting Committee of the National Disability Act, which is yet to go to Parliament, also called on the Health Promotion Unit of the GHS to advocate against the stigmatisation of PWDs and create awareness to ensure that people accept disability as not being inability.

The National President of the Ghana Federation of Disability Organisations (GFD), Joseph Atsu Homadzi, commended the DG-GHS for his interest in PWDs, saying their healthcare needs had been pushed to the back burner for far too long.

This, he said, had made it difficult for them whenever they tried to access healthcare facilities and seek medical attention, leaving them with many challenges.

He called on other heads of agencies to emulate the directive of the GHS to make the lives of PWDs in the country more comfortable than it is presently.

The Head of the Assistive Technology Unit, University of Ghana, Alexander Bankole Williams, said PWDs over the years had struggled to access healthcare needs in the country, saying that it had been very hard to get anyone in power to turn their fortunes around or attend their programmes to have first-hand knowledge of their concerns.

He, therefore, commended the DG-GHS for the meeting.

He called on the GHS, in the short term, to consider training healthcare providers, including doctors and nurses, to be critically aware of how to handle their impairments.

In the long term, he urged the GHS to train its providers on how to label medications with accessible features.  

Some of the participants called on the government to collaborate with organisations that work with children with disability to provide guidelines to help streamline their activities.

The Country Director of the Korea Foundation for International Healthcare (KOFIH) Ghana Office, Bomin Yang, said the organisation was in the process of rolling out a pilot project to provide free assistive devices of different kinds for children who needed them.

He said the foundation’s new project was implementing rehabilitation services for children with disability in the Northern, Volta and Ashanti regions.

After the meeting, the DG-GHS, together with the executives, visited the National Prosthetics and Orthotics Clinic (NPOC) within the GHS headquarters.