The National Health Insurance Council will from October this year, come out with a new medicine list for the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS). Speaking at a day's workshop organised by the Ghana Health Service (GHS) in Accra on Tuesday to sensitise journalists to appropriately educate the public on the NHIS, the Schemes Coordinator of the NHIC, Mr Francis Ando Agyei, said it had become necessary to review the medicine list in t order to add more to the existing one. He said that was because of complaints the various district mutual health insurance schemes " ,(DMHIS) received from both health providers and the insured that the list lacked many of the pre¬ferred medicines to treat diseases. Mr Agyei explained that even with the review, not every medicine could be put on the list because Ghana's health sector had to go according to World Health Organisation (WHO) recommendations to prescribe generic medicines. In his presentation, the GHS National Coordi¬nator on the NHIS, Mr Philip Akanzinge, said hospital attendance in the country had increased between 200 per cent and 300 per cent since the introduction of the NHIS. He said the constant increase in attendance had revealed that people really needed health care but not just to test the system, as was previously believed. He said records at the hospital had brought to the fore the number of Ghanaians who hitherto needed health care but who could not access it because of the cash-and-carry system. He, however, said there was the need for an increase in healthcare facilities and health professionals to complement the increase in the number of patients at health facilities. He noted that for the scheme to survive, there was the need for many Ghanaians to enroll under it, since insurance schemes survived on large numbers. Touching on constraints, Mr Akanzinge said the lack of health facilities closer to the people had affected the enrolment figure significantly, since people refused to do that when there were no facilities to access. He also mentioned the unequal distribution of health professionals of all categories and the lack of basic equipment, particularly at the lower level, as challenges against the smooth implementation of the scheme. The Director-General of the GHS; Dr Elias K. Sory, said there was the need for people to prevent diseases, since continued increase in hospital attendance could collapse the NHIS. He noted that since it was not possible for all sicknesses to be cured at all times, and since some of them could result in death, people should prevent diseases in the first place. The Greater Accra Director of Health Services Dr Irene Agyepong Amarteyfio, said delays being experienced by patients in health facilities were not deliberate but the result of genuine problems adding that almost all the health facilities in the region had not seen any change, yet the population kept increasing. She pointed out that the cumbersome nature of the forms to be filled for insured persons at hospitals sometimes made them to stay longer at the facilities and asked for a review of the items on the forms. Dr Cynthia Bannerman of the GHS educated the participants on two publications by the GHS: The Code of Ethics for Health Workers and The Patient' Charter and took the opportunity to appeal to journalists to study the books to enable them to educate patients, especially on their rights. Source: Daily Graphic