The Health Minister-designate Dr Benard Okoe-Boye says the government will commission and operationalise Agenda 111 projects in phases.

Dr Okoe-Boye was speaking at the opening of the 2024 Health Sector Annual Summit in Accra, a platform to assess the performance of the health sector and to reflect on successes, achievements, challenges, and plans towards achieving an improved healthcare system for the population.  

“We will phase them to be able to commission a number of completed hospitals in Phase One, operationalize them and move on to another batch of hospitals,” he said.

The three-day summit will discuss how the health sector can realise the Universal Health Coverage (UHC) target by 2030 and the goals of the National Health Policy (2020) which is “to promote, restore and maintain healthy lives for people living in Ghana”.

The summit is on the theme, “Quality Healthcare Delivery: A Catalyst for Achieving Universal Health Coverage in Ghana.”

The Health Minister-designate said the year had been a challenging one for the health sector due to accumulated unpaid bills, uncompleted projects, irregular supply of commodities, shortage of health commodities like medicines and consumables and the capping of Internally Generated Funds (IGF) of some agencies.

He said the inadequate numbers and distribution of critical health professionals and difficulty in attracting and retaining critical staff, especially in deprived remote areas was a challenge to the health sector.

“The recent intermittent power supply has negatively impacted healthcare service delivery in Ghana, additionally, public hospitals in Ghana are struggling to pay their electricity bills and health Service Providers lament that over 40 per cent of their revenue to pay electricity bills during their performance review engagement,” he said.

Dr Oko-Boye said the Health Ministry would from this year and beyond pursue service delivery interventions using the life course and one-health approach in a whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach to deliver high-quality healthcare,

The ministry will also build a better and more efficient health system to respond to public health emergencies using the appropriate quality interventions through the implementation and monitoring of health policies.

He said the health ministry would also re-position the health workforce to take care of the current migration issues to the benefit of Ghanaians.

The rollout of the E-health platform to the lower health facilities in line with the government's digitization drive will be completed, he said.

“We will strengthen private sector collaboration to operationalise the newly established bio-equivalent centre which will lead to the production and export of herbal medicine, clinically tested for efficacy in Ghana.” Dr Oko-Boye added.