‘Establish Health Literacy Month’

Saturday, February 23, 2008 The Mirror (Pg 18)

By Rebecca Kwei
A Chief Consultant of the Ghana Health Service (GHS), Dr Sam Adjei, has proposed a Health Literacy Month during which intensive health information will be made available to the population to enable them adopt positive lifestyles.
He noted that such health information when well communicated through various channels and languages will improve people’s knowledge and enable them to take good decisions on health.
Dr Adjei said this at the launch of a 16-page National Health Promotion Policy in Accra.
The policy provides an overall framework for health promotion development and practice in the country. Health promotion is essential in influencing behavioural change among the populace by enhancing the adoption of positive lifestyles by individuals, families and communities.
Dr Adjei who chaired the function, also stressed the need to identify and promote appropriate in-service training programmes for medical practitioners who see patients on a daily basis to enable them provide them with information on health that would enable patients adopt healthy lifestyles.
He said another important area to consider for the success of the policy was the training of personnel who would be deployed in relevant settings to promote health and the adequate resource to support the implementation of the activities.
The Director of Policy, Planning Monitoring and Evaluation of the GHS, Dr Frank Nyonator, who launched the policy on behalf of the Director-General, Dr Elias Sory, said the document had been developed in response to the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) recommendation to member countries that formal policies on health promotion were needed.
He said in developing the document, careful considerations had been made to place it within the context of relevant strategic documents and framework of the Ministry of Health/GHS.
“Health promotion is a means of increasing individual and collective participation in health action and of strengthening programmes through the use of methods. These methods are combined through comprehensive approaches which ensure action at all levels of society, leading to enhanced health”, he said.
He was hopeful that the key themes in the policy would serve as a guide in the development of evidence-based health promotion interventions to promote the health of the population.
In his remarks, the WHO representative, Dr Joaquim Saweka, said a nation could attain meaningful development only when its people were healthy.
To ensure that, he said, required among other things, a deliberate effort to inform the people about the need to stay healthy as well as how to attain and maintain good health.
Dr Saweka noted that getting health information effectively across to people was no mean task, especially in Ghana where part of the people are illiterate with respect to the language used by health professionals.
He health promotion was an approach to health development that had been adopted in many countries of the world with support from the WHO.
Dr Saweka expressed the hope that the policy would guide the implementation of health promotion in the country to ensure that all major players are brought on board and also effectively involve people and the communities in taking decisions on their own health.
“We need to act fast to put a stop to the increasing rates of diseases, especially chronic diseases that are easily preventable; and it is with such a policy as you have; and its plans that are well executed that we can achieve a healthy population”, he said.
The Deputy Director in charge of Health Promotion, Mrs Mary Arday-Kotei, said the Health Promotion Department had contributed to the population’s increased awareness and knowledge of health and other related issues.
She said the department was, however, confronted with inadequate health promotion staff and the inadequate and inconsistent funding for health promotion activities and these do not enable the department to sustain interventions to achieve the desired behavioural outcomes.