Ghana, Tanzania share knowledge in health systems

Thursday, October 2, 2008 (Daily Graphic Pg 32)

Story: Rebecca Kwei, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Ghana and Tanzania are exchanging health system innovations especially at the district level to help accelerate progress on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
The initiative is the effort of the Ministries of Health in Ghana and Tanzania, which have decided to take up the global challenge of improving health systems to deliver the available technologies and interventions to achieve the health-related MDGs.
Dr Frank K. Nyonator, the Director of Policy Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation Division of the Ghana Health Service, announced this at the 8th Annual General and Scientific Meeting of the In-depth Network in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. It was on the theme, “In-depth at 10: From Knowledge Generation to Improved Health Policy and Practice”.
He explained that the Tanzania Essential Health Interventions Project (TEHIP) had provided districts the tools to make informed decisions about the allocation of healthcare resources and enabled them to provide services to tackle common diseases.
These efforts, he said, led to dramatic declines in child mortality and that the number of districts benefiting from TEHIP had been increased to 120, adding that Tanzania was on target to achieve the MDG of reducing childhood mortality by two thirds from 1990 to 2015.
He said Ghana was looking at the Tanzanian model, which focuses on the burden of disease and how to allocate money for effective disbursement of resources.
Dr Nyonator said Ghana had also already started with delivering health service to the community using the Community-based Health Planning and Services (CHPS) and by importing TEHIP it would help strengthen the roll-out of CHPS.
He said in Tanzania, the project would build new capabilities into the country’s existing interventions while integrating Ghana’s strategies for providing community-based health services according to the country’s strategic plan.
In Ghana, the project will add Tanzania’s systems for strengthening the management of district-level health systems into its existing CHPS programming in order to accelerate the scale-up of such programmes.
 Five districts in Ghana, namely Kintampo, Dodowa, Nkwanta, Kassena-Nankana and Dangme West, and three districts in Tanzania will be involved in the pilot project.
Dr Nyonator was optimistic that the project would help improve the health of Ghanaians as well as achieve the MDGs.