Bolgatanga, Sept 24, GNA - The Upper East Regional Minister, Mr. Mark Owen Woyongo, has appealed to the Minister of Health and the Director General of the Ghana Health Service to urgently post doctors to the region to halt preventable deaths in recent times. He also appealed to doctors and those of northern descent who want to save lives to consider the gravity of the situation and come to the region and offer services to humanity.

Mr. Woyongo who spoke at a press conference on Wednesday, said the situation was so appalling that the three doctors at the Regional Hospital in Bolgatanga, which is supposed to be a referral point and offering clinical services, could not contain the pressure. Patients have therefore resorted to all forms of treatment that sometimes worsen their situation and forced them to return to the hospital with even more complicated cases that most often lead to deaths.

He said some districts did not have doctors and so the Regional Director of Health Service, Dr. Koku Awoornor-Williams, sometimes had to leave administrative assignments and visit the hospitals to do consultations. "But this cannot continue for long and in view of the worsening situation, we would like to share our predicament with the world", he said.

Mr Woyongo said even though the region had employed several strategies to attract doctors and other health workers including incentive packages and sponsorships among others, all those strategies had not worked.

He suggested an affirmative action to immediately deploy doctors to the region to save the situation. Dr. Awoornor-Williams said the doctor patient ratio in the regional hospital was one doctor to 40,000 patients. He said the Bongo District Hospital for instance had no doctor because the resident doctor had to join other two doctors for further studies.

He said out of 19 doctors sent to the region last year none of them reported while this year no graduate from any of the country's medical schools chose to serve in the region. Dr. Awoornor-Williams said he wondered why no authority had come out to question them why they failed to accept postings to the area. He said as part of measures to solve the tackle the problem temporarily the regional directorate had invited two of the eight medical doctors at the Navrongo Research Centre to help out. The directorate also has plans to move additional two doctors from the Navrongo Research Centre also on temporal base to some of the health facilities in the districts to offer clinical services. He suggested the creation of a fund from the Savannah Accelerated Development Authority to sponsor students with interest in medicine who would be ready to serve in any of the three northern regions as a long term plan to attract and retain medical doctors and other technical human resource for the health sector in northern Ghana.