College of Health Sciences Scientific Conference opens

Accra, Sept. 26, GNA - Mr. Albert Essien, Managing Director, Ecobank West Africa, on Wednesday said that Ghana needed to develop home bred solution to home bred problems that had plagued its health delivery system.

"The solution lies in us. Together we can make it. We have the people, we have the know-how," he said at the launch of the first College of Health Sciences Scientific Conference in Accra. "We need to develop home-bred solution to home-bred problems if we are to see continuing improvements in health delivery in Ghana," Mr Essien added.

The three-day Conference on the theme: "Advancing the Health of Ghanaians through Research and Capacity Building", is to create a bigger platform for the voices of all the institutions under the College to be heard as well as bring their experiences to be shared with stakeholders and the general public.

The institutions under the College are the Medical and Dental School, Schools of Nursing, Public Health, Allied Health Sciences and the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research. The Conference would also bring to the fore research findings in a manner that would be easily understood and for immediate application to help reduce the burden of diseases, both infectious and non-infectious, as well as address communicable and non-communicable diseases, issues of diagnosis, treatment, control and prevention.

Mr Essien said the plethora of health problems could be solved by the local breed of highly skilled professionals who could contribute meaningfully and significantly in the form of research and capacity building to enhance the health of Ghanaians.

He noted that the country had to train health professionals to engage in research and development and apply knowledge and technology to local problems, moving beyond mere application of results generated by others.

This, he said, could be achieved by partnering with organizations such as John Hopkins University, World Health Organisation's Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Malaria Partnership and Institute of Population and Reproductive Health.

Mr. Essien said the birth of the College of Health Sciences was a step in the right direction to help broaden opportunities for the training of health professional and stem the tide of brain drain. He termed brain drain "The Rapture", which was no doubt a critical drain on the resources of the health sector.

Quoting statistics from a United Nations Report on International Migration, Mr Essien said by the end of 2005, Ghana had lost over 50 per cent of its skilled labour out of which a staggering 90 per cent were health professionals.

He said issues of brain drain had "push" and "pull" factors and noted that some of the push factors were low remunerations, poor working conditions and low job satisfaction while the pull factors included increased demand for health professionals in developed countries. Another serious public health problem was lack of essential medicines, which included availability and affordability and were influenced by factors such as pricing, financing and supply. "This poses a serious challenge to us as a nation," Mr Essien said. On research, he said global investment on diseases that mainly affected the poor was a drop in the ocean in relation to the high disease burden involved and called for an acceleration in the development and implementation of urgently needed tools and strategic research for disease control by involving health professionals and researchers at every stage of the research development process. Mr. Essien advocated the integration of traditional medicine, which about 80 percent of Ghanaians had access to, into the health care system as the Japanese, Indians and Chinese had done and debunked the notion that traditional medicine was backward.

"Even though Ghanaian traditional medicine has been stigmatized, it continues to thrive because it is culturally accepted and accessible to the overwhelming majority of Ghanaians."

He commended the establishment of an endowment fund by the College and advised that research proposals should be properly packaged to enable institutions buy into it.

Mr. Essien said such institutions could be acknowledged by having awards in the health profession named after them.

Professor Aaron Lawson, Provost of the College, announced the establishment of a School of Biomedical Sciences and Research to provide basic para-clinical science education for the College and other health-related institutions.

The establishment of the School, he said, was expected to attract students from the sub-region as well as complement the clinical training of Korle Bu Teaching Hospital, which was woefully inadequate to take in a large number of students.

Prof. Lawson said the construction of the College's School of Allied Health Science building started at the University of Ghana a few years ago was not progressing as expected and called on the Government and the GETfund to assist.

"The School is virtually operating in borrowed rooms which are not adequate for the kind of work expected." The Provost appealed to the media to be interested in the activities of the College to push further the agenda of helping to disseminate information on preventive medicine. "We will emerge from this conference with rich experiences, the outcome of which will also contribute to the wealth of knowledge that is required to improve the health status of this our dear nation," Prof. Lawson said.

In a speech read on behalf, the Minister of Health, Major Courage Quashigah (Rtd) commended organizers of the Conference, which, he said, would benefit participants and their patients. He reiterated his call for the adoption of regenerative health, saying, "given the acute shortage of medical professionals, it will be more prudent to promote the adoption of healthy lifestyles to prevent diseases and thus reduce the pressure on our hospitals". The Minister said adopting healthy eating habits, ensuring greater cleanliness, exercising regularly and generally abstaining from dangerous lifestyles like alcoholism and smoking would ensure the optimum use of limited resources available to the health sector and the country.

Major Quashigah expressed the hope that issues raised would prompt the focus of the next conference. "The poverty cycle, which we as a people are striving to break out of through the Poverty Reduction Strategy and similar initiatives, would produce the desired benefit if we do not make the paradigm shift."

In a speech read on behalf of Professor Dominic Fobih, Minister of Education, Science and Sports, he said it was important that all stakeholders including the Ministry of Health provided creative ways of ensuring that life-threatening issues were handled with dispatch to advance the health of Ghanaians through research and capacity building. He said the proposal for the establishment of the School of Biomedical Sciences and a Postgraduate Research that would increase intake at the Basic and Para-Clinical levels was being studied by the Ministry for further consideration.

Prof. Fobih assured the College of the Ministry's commitment to collaborate with the Ministry of Health to enhance the study of the sciences in the country.

Launching the conference, Professor Clifford Tagoe, Vice Chancellor, University Of Ghana, implored scientists to make more of their research available to implementers.

"We have to unlock the wealth of scientific knowledge and get it to everyone. If scientific knowledge is accepted, scientific progress is accelerated."

He urged the College to continue to strive for excellence, as that was one of the pillars of the College and the University as a whole.