Health facilities regulator cries for resources - Intends to help transform sector

The Board Chairman of the Health Facilities Regulatory Agency (HFRA), Nana Otuo Acheampong, has urged the government to empower the agency with logistics and resources to strengthen it to deliver on its mandate of improving health care in the country.

He informed the Daily Graphic of several challenges confronting the agency which has the sole mandate of regulating the about 30,000 health facilities in the country.

In an interview yesterday in Accra soon after the board of the agency was sworn into office, Nana Acheampong revealed that although he intended to strengthen the agency to enable it to deliver on its important task of ensuring quality health delivery in the country, there were inadequate resources and logistics available to him and his team, which hindered them from delivering on this mandate.

“To be able to monitor the activities of over 30,000 institutions, it is simply inadequate to have a single car at the disposal of the agency,” he stated.

Nana Acheampong stressed that aside from occasional reports of corruption and underhand dealings impeding the work of the agency, its very place of work was too small to accommodate the needed staff to man its operations.
 
“We have to give policy directions and regulate how these health facilities operate, but our very place of work is too small and we will need a bigger place,” he said.

He, however, indicated that the agency could practically be responsible for managing its financial affairs through internally generated funds from payments for licences and permits but their current state of affairs needed to be improved first.

 “Presently, resources are one of our challenges, but it is one which is self-inflicted. Because with so many institutions to be licensed and pay fees, if we had managed it well, then resources shouldn’t be a constraint because internally, we can generate money,” he noted.

HFRA mandate

 Since 1988, 489 policy interventions have been identified to address quality of health care in the country.

Among them, the development of health protocols and guidelines are the most frequent interventions, followed by health policies and strategies; interventions related to health information; development of training manuals and staff training; development of regulations and interventions related to organisation of health services.

However, less effort has been made to develop processes and systems for supervision and monitoring in the health sector.

For the past 20 years, the country’s health sector has separated the policy making, service delivery, financing and regulation functions of the Ministry of Health (MoH) and has allocated some of these functions to different agencies such as the Ghana Health Service (GHS), the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA), teaching hospitals and other regulatory bodies.

These different institutions and agencies address the quality of health care in different ways. The responsibility for provider accreditation was placed on the HFRA.

History of HFRA

The HFRA, which came into being in 2012 and was developed from the Private Hospitals and Maternity Homes Act, Act 9, enacted in 1958 and later amended by the NLC Decree 395 in 1969, established the Private Hospitals and Maternity Homes Board (PHMHB) to regulate all private hospitals and maternity homes in Ghana.

The PHMHB later had its roles and functions upgraded and taken over by the HFRA due to the amendment of the NLC Decree 395 to Health Facilities Regulatory Agency Act, Act 829 in 2011.