The Ghana Medical Care Trust Fund, also known as ‘Mahama Cares,’ will not replace the free dialysis treatment on the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), Kwabena Mintah Akandoh, the Minister of Health, has assured.

The initiative would rather generate a clear roadmap to ensure sustainable funding for the continued running of the project, irrespective of the government in power.

Mr Akandoh gave the assurance following the inauguration of the nine-member Technical Taskforce for the Mahama Cares initiative on Wednesday.

The Mahama Cares aims to provide financial support to individuals suffering from chronic health conditions, including kidney and liver diseases, cancers, and cardiac ailments.

The technical taskforce, however, seeks to develop a robust policy and legal framework to establish Mahama Cares as a statutory entity and design a suitable funding model to ensure the fund’s viability for generations.

It also aims to establish clear and transparent eligibility and disbursement criteria to guarantee fairness and efficiency, evaluating current healthcare infrastructure and suggesting improvements to ensure accessibility.

“The task force has about five weeks to complete whatever they have been mandated to do. Mortalities with respect to chronic diseases are very high, and before you will be able to operationalise such a fund, you need to go through a lot of processes,” Mr Akandoh said.

“The blueprint, the legal framework, the sources of funding, among others make it imperative to get the task force in place to come up with the roadmap for operationalisation.”

“They will be at the center of affairs to coordinate and give everybody willing to provide input into the initiative so that we can consolidate everything, and it becomes a workable document.”

“So, this will not replace the free dialysis treatment on the NHIS by the previous administration. But I will have to go back in answering to say that I was a ranking member of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Health and at the time we suggested that we make provisions for dialysis and Ghc 2 million was allocated.”

“An additional Ghc 2 million was added from corporate social responsibility making Ghc 4 million. And I can tell you that Ghc 4 million cannot take care of all dialysis across the country. So, there is a need for sustainable and reliable sources of funding.”

To ensure sustainability, the government was putting up a legal framework, even if it means going to Parliament as a statutory entity well established to define all sources of funding so that it would not be abandoned irrespective of those in power.”

Mr Kojo Baffour Ahenkorah, the President of the Renal Patients Association, in a media interview, assured that dialysis treatment was still free and patients with their NHIS card could visit facilities to dialyze.

“Currently the mortality rate among kidney patients has reduced drastically due to the free dialysis treatment on the NHIS instituted by the previous administration,” adding that any attempt to do otherwise by the present government would put their lives at risk.

Mr Ahenkorah said most of the renal patients were in their youthful age between 18 to 40 and not working, hence there was the need for the current government to engage to know the way forward, if the previous administration did not get the implementation of the policy right.

He acknowledged that even though the inauguration of the technical task force was laudable, they were not involved in the process as beneficiaries of the Mahama Cares programme.

Mr Ahenkorah appealed to the Government to involve them in whatever plans they had to know the way forward as their lives depended on the free dialysis currently being offered.