WAHO advocates improvement in health coverage in West Africa
Accrs, Feb. 14, 2012
Members of the West African Health Organization have called for continual advocacy and sensitization to deepen political commitment and further consensus building among stakeholders on health issues.
The call was made at a just ended meeting of WAHO in Accra, to develop an action plan for the generalization of Universal Health Coverage (UHC) in member states.
The meeting was also to create the platform and opportunities for member countries to understand challenges, similarities and possibility of resolving the problems.
Participants at the meeting noted that member countries were at different stages of development and implementation of the UHC.
The West African Health Organization therefore, said there was the need to encourage member countries to create a national network to ensure that Universal Health Coverage was always on the national agenda to sustain the progress made so far.
The West African Health Organization said the gathering was also to bring to the fore, approaches that have worked in other countries and those that did not work, create an atmosphere for networking and communicating online in sharing experiences, to ensure universal health access for all citizens in the West African sub region.
It said to ensure sustainability of UHC, there was the need for domestic resources mobilization, capacity building within the overall health system, strengthening of their respective countries and setting up good monitoring and evaluation system in support of the implementation of UHC.
According to the research, Ghana was the only country which seemed to have made significant progress towards providing universal health coverage through a national health insurance scheme for the majority of the citizenry.
In cases where health insurance plans have been introduced, premiums are proving to be as prohibitory as were user fees and that there have been problems collecting them in some nations and premium-based models, for the most part, have not generated the financial resources needed to sustain health care systems.
According to the research, though member countries were slowly moving in the direction of universal health coverage and national health insurance plans, they had no policy framework to back them as Ghana had done and that there was no harmonization of schemes in the other four countries.
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