The Ghana Health Service (GHS) says its deployment of health personnel to all the voter registration centres across the country will not disrupt the country’s healthcare delivery system.
According to the Director-General of the GHS, Dr. Patrick Kuma-Aboagye, the country has enough workers at its disposal to attend to both the registration centres and the normal health delivery system.
Dr. Kuma-Aboagye in explaining the rationale for the deployment of health personnel said it forms part of enhanced measures put in place by the government to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus among registrants and the Electoral Commission (EC) officers.
“We have other auxiliary health staff, they will be deployed based on their availability and will cover-up for others without necessarily compromising healthcare. We are not moving people from the hospital to the registration centres.”
“We have other public health staff. We are not overstretched. We have a relatively stable number and there are no high demands. Broadly, I will not say that we are overstretched,” he said.
“Also, if we do not respond and things go wrong and we have more cases, we will not be able to [handle] it. So it is all part of the overall responsibility to ensure that we are able to manage the positives that will come out rather than waiting for them at the hospital.”
“We are just making sure people don’t get infected before coming to us. So as a health sector we will make the best use of our resources that we have to contain the disease – we are going out there to ensure that people don’t get infected,” he explained.
Regional Health Directors have been asked to deploy health personnel to provide health support during the voter registration exercise which commences on Tuesday, June 30, 2020.
A notice signed by the Director-General asked the Regional Directors to dedicate health staff to all published registrations centres for the exercise.
“The Electoral Commission of Ghana is scheduled to commence the compilation of a new voters’ register. The exercise is expected to start from 30th June 2020 to 6th August 2020. As part of mitigating measures to prevent further spread of the disease, you are by this letter directed to assign and post dedicated health staff to each of the centres as per the attached list of published registration centres,” the statement directed.
