Community Volunteers and administrators of the major Government hospitals in the Tamale Metro of the Northern Region of Ghana have been trained to use short messaging services (SMS) on their mobile phones to report and respond to issues affecting service delivery in the respective hospitals.
The training was organized by Centre for Active Learning and Integrated Development (CALID) as part of activities of the “Fighting Unapproved Charges for Health Services” Project. The Project has a special focus on 3 health facilities; Tamale Teaching Hospital (TTH), Tamale Central Hospital and The Tamale West Hospital.
The one-year project is supported by STAR-Ghana under its Anti-Corruption Call with funding from the UKAid, DANIDA and the European Union (EU). The overall objective of the project is to contribute to an improvement in the Quality of health care delivery to citizens in the Tamale Metropolis as a result of the elimination of unapproved charges by health officials.
Information gathered by CALID from some citizens has revealed that: some staff of the selected hospitals have been charging patients and pregnant women illegal fees which often, are not receipted. For instance, it is in the public domain that hospital staff at the theatre demanded or collected an amount of GHC 200.00 from pregnant women before they were attended to.
Additionally, there have been allegations of Clients who go to retrieve the bodies of their deceased relatives and were asked to pay GHC90.00 but received a receipt of GHC50.00” Mohammed Awal Sumani Bapio, Executive Director – CALID.
Mr Bapio further indicated that: Some family members and the youth are beginning to counter the situation with violence. “There was a situation where a community forcefully picked the corpse of a late member for processing for burial without paying for the unapproved fees. This resulted in chaos and near conflict situation. It took the Northern Regional Minister and other prime stakeholders to intercede” he said.
The STAR-Ghana SMS platform serves as a means of engagement between citizen representatives and administrative representatives of the respective selected hospitals. This will allow for constant flow of information between the two parties to address pertinent issues and avert any misinformation which could lead to violence.
The Citizen representatives are leading members of the League of Youth Coalition in Tamale. The League of Youth Coalition is a coalition of over fifty (50) Youth groups spread across the entire Tamale metropolis and the Sagnarigu District. The Coalition has representation from all the affiliate Youth groups who are elected by their respective Youth Associations to front their issues at the Coalition during their usual periodic meetings.
The leadership of the coalition intend engage with the appropriate State Actors to seek redress and feedback to the affected individuals using the name communication channel.
Participants at the training were sensitized on the various forms of services and payments at the hospitals. The citizen representatives expressed their satisfaction on the knowledge shared “With the information shared by the P.R.O., now we know the what questions to ask when we receive the reports” Mohammed Inusah, League of Youth Coalition.
Based on these learning, participants were taken through the relevance of information sharing, core principles and ethics of reporting, as well as some tit bits of mobile phone security to facilitate an effective process of using their mobile phones to provide feedback on the services received from the selected Hospitals.
Participants can now anonymously report issues of non-receipted payments, unavailability or otherwise of consumables, drugs among other services to the hospital administrators for redress. The SMS Platform allows both parties – the reporter and the duty bearer to rate the level of satisfaction of responses received and the relevance of the reports sent respectively.
Representatives of the selected hospitals embraced the platform as a useful tool to support their work: “our objective is to stop illegal collection of money and not to just arrest… with this platform, I can turn up at anyone’s desk and prove to them when they collected money without receipting, this I believe will deter the culprits” Dr. Ken Osei Mensah, P.R.O. Tamale Teaching Hospital.
In attendance were representatives of CALID, the League of Youth Coalition and STAR-Ghana.