Ghana Health Service launches revised website

The Ghana Health Service (GHS) has launched a reactivated and interactive website, www.ghs.gov.gh, to facilitate easy communication between the service and its publics.

The revised website has the GHS social media platforms, COVID-19 update platform and supplementary information on its regional directorates incorporated into it to provide a one-stop shop for all relevant information for public consumption.

The Director-General of the Ghana Health Service, Dr Patrick Kuma-Aboagye, launched the website at the closing ceremony of the third national maternal and child health conference in Accra last Friday.

He said although the GHS had always owned a website, it realised that it was not fit for purpose, hence the need to update the website in order to make it more interactive.

Dr Kuma-Aboagye said a special team had been mandated to frequently update the new website with press releases, events, special reports, annual reports, among other vital information.

Closing remarks

The three-day conference, which brought together key stakeholders in the health sector, was dedicated to discussing pertinent issues such as the strategic approaches to safeguard and sustain reproductive, maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health (RMNCAH) and nutrition service delivery.

They also discussed broad issues on reproductive health and nutrition as well as some of the new initiatives that had been born from past implementation, challenges and opportunities such as the establishment of Model Health Centre and Network of Practice, information and communications technology (ICT) for improvement of health service delivery.

In his closing remarks, Dr Kuma-Aboagye also reacted to how the GHS would operationalise the concept of wellness programmes across the country and reiterated the need to focus on preventive components which would focus on broadening early detection.

“In the roll out of this initiative, we will also form partnerships with other relevant sectors and agencies,” he stated, and urged the participants, especially the health workers, to leverage the experiences learned from the COVID-19 pandemic and redouble the efforts that yielded positive results, since the pandemic broke out, for better healthcare outcomes.

“As a service we will continue to improve on alternative and flexible approaches to deliver care such as ICT for health, digitising medical records, strengthening tele-medicine and creating an e-library storage of data and reports,” the director-general said.

Priority

Again, Dr Kuma-Aboagye said key priority areas of the service for accelerated action included the branding of the GHS and addressing non-communicable diseases (NCDs), among other emerging health issues.