Establish district health insurance schemes

Mr. Edmund Nkrumah, Manager of the Dormaa Municipal Health Insurance Scheme has appealed to the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA) to establish district health insurance schemes for Dormaa East and Dormaa West Districts of Brong–Ahafo Region.

This he said would reduce the rising number of people from those districts trooping to the facility for the biometric registration.

He explained that, staffs of the Scheme were seriously contending with heavy workload that often resulted in late closure from work as a result of the high number of clients they had to deal with.

Speaking in an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA) in Dormaa–Ahenkro on Tuesday, he said many of the people who came to the facility were from very remote areas of Dormaa Municipality and some surrounding communities of the two districts.

He said his outfit had teams in Wamfie, the district capital of Dormaa East and Nkrakwanta, the district capital of Dormaa West, who were registering people from those two districts and attributed the overwhelming number of clients who turned up at their premises to the limited supply of biometric verification devices as the two districts had one each of the machine.

“We are in the peak season and a lot of people have expired cards. Due to financial constraints, some of them who are not able to register on the same day are unable to return to their various communities but prefer to wait behind our premises till the next morning to register”, he stated.

Mr. Nkrumah noted that challenges in providing telecommunication services were impeding their progress, adding that, “in certain areas access to 3G networks was very difficult and this is what is needed for our operations”.

He called for an extension of electricity to those remote areas to enhance their activities.

The Manager described as positive, the patronage and response to the new biometric registration, saying that, this is due to the quick and instant method in which processing is done

“It’s unlike the old card, which took a long time to be processed”.