Heather Cameron – Canadian Ambassador to Ghana
Dr Heather Cameron, Canadian High Commissioner to Ghana has paid a day’s visit to the Choggu Health Centre to acquaint herself with the Technology for Maternal and Child Health project (T4MCH) being implemented at the facility.
At the facility, which is under the Sagnarigu Municipality, the High Commissioner observed how the community Electronic Medical Records (cEMR) system of the project was being operationalised and interacted directly with officials from the Ghana Health Service, health staff, pregnant women, breastfeeding mothers, traditional leaders and the community members about the relevance of the project.
She also used the opportunity to study some of the weekly mobile messages on maternal and child health delivered to women on weekly basis, and interacted with some of the beneficiaries of the project, who were present to ascertain how beneficial T4MCH had been to them.
The T4MCH project involves innovative use of Information and Communication Technology tools to make maternal and child health information easily accessible to pregnant women and new mothers, their partners or husbands and relatives.
The project is being implemented at 33 health facilities in nine districts of the Northern, Upper West and Volta Regions to contribute to the government’s effort at reducing maternal and infant mortality.
It is being implemented by Savana Signatures, a Tamale-based Non-Governmental Organisation, in partnership with Salasan, a Canada based organisation, and funded by Global Affairs Canada.
Dr Cameron, in an address at the facility at Choggu, commended all stakeholders including; project implementers, health staff and beneficiaries for their commitment to contributing to reducing maternal and child mortality in the country.
She said “I think that this project is very interesting, you are all willing to do something different to improve maternal survival and child survival, and especially, for the staff, for being the first in the municipality and in the region to try something like this, congratulations.”
She spoke about the mobile messaging strategy of the project saying “This is a really interesting e-service, pushing out messages to women in their own language here in Ghana, about how to stay healthy when pregnant and when to come in for care.”
Mr George Abraham, Sagnarigu Municipal Director of Health lauded the cEMR for ensuring efficiency in health care delivery in the area saying “the cEMR system is a very useful one in the sense that it ensures continuity of care” compared to the manual records of clients, which sometimes got lost.
Mr Abraham said the cEMR had also improved the facility’s reporting mechanism such that with the click of a button, a report was generated whereas in the past entries from different age groups had to be manually computed and put together as a report.”
Mr John Stephen Agbenyo, Executive Director of Savana Signatures thanked the health staff for working hard to reduce maternal and child mortality encouraging them to continue to offer their best to improve maternal and child health in the region and the country as a whole.
Mr Agbenyo also expressed gratitude to the chiefs of the area for supporting the project and encouraging women to regularly visit health facilities.
The Regent of Choggu, Mumuni Yakubu Nayi appealed for the expansion of the health facility to adequately cater for the high number of people it currently served and appealed for the construction of accommodation for health staff to ensure that they stayed near the facility and attended to women in labour during the night to avoid loss of lives.
Source: GNA
