‘Take NHIS revenue from the control of Finance Ministry’

A Senior Lecturer at the Department of Public Administration and Health Services Management of the University of Ghana Business School, Dr Gordon Abekah-Nkrumah, says the best way to address financial challenges in the health sector is to create a system that independently manages revenue of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS).

According to him, this would save revenue purposely for the NHIS from the control of the Finance Ministry. Although the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) promised in its manifesto to address challenges facing the Scheme, he believes a new approach is required.

Dr Abekah-Nkrumah was speaking at the post-election manifesto policy dialogue with the media, organised last week by the Ghana Centre for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana) under the theme: “Promoting Responsive and Responsible Manifestos for Inclusive Development Project.”

The programme was aimed at tracking political parties’ manifestoes and how those promises are implemented.

The Lecturer further noted that the NPP, in the run up to the 2020 elections, said in its manifesto that the NHIS needed total overhauling, in order to ensure speedy disbursement, as well as to enhance its sustainability. He explained that delays in disbursement are not necessarily a problem of efficient claims processing, but an issue of funding.

This, Dr Abekah-Nkrumah said, is “securing the necessary resources into the NHIS is, perhaps, the most important health financing challenge to be addressed, given that it has inter-related linkages and ramifications for several other challenges in the health sector.”

He also acknowledged that addressing issues in the health sector must equally cover challenges such as production inefficiencies and dysfunctional behaviours of health service providers.

“It will, therefore, be important for government to prioritise its agenda in the health sector to free up fiscal space to allocate additional funds to the NHIS,” he stated.

The public administration lecturer further suggested ways to reduce the doctor–to-patient ratio by assigning pharmacist certain roles other than dispensary.

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