The Ghana Health Service’s (GHS) Health Promotion Division has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with some of private sector organizations to promote wellness initiatives throughout the country.
The initiative is part of a broader strategy to involve the private sector to back the Service and the National Inter-Agency Coordination Committee for Health Promotion (ICC-HP) Committee to carry out their mandate effectively.
The MOU was signed at the National ICC-HP Committee review meeting in Accra.
A total of 56 commitment commitments from potential private sector partners were secured with the aim of contributing to public health efforts through their corporate social responsibility initiatives.
Seven partnership agreements have been signed, with partners pledging both monetary and in-kind resources to support social and behavioural change activities in Ghana.
The ICC-HP Committee was relaunched in July 2023 with the mandate of developing strategies to educate Ghanaians and change behaviours for improved healthcare and well-being.
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Mrs Mabel Asafo, Acting Director of Health Promotion at GHS, said active participation from the private sector is essential to help the committee improve its efforts while integrating best practices.
She said that media participation was vital because it would help debunk myths and cultural barriers that were kept people from observing safety precautions and participating in health care promotion initiatives.
“This is something that we started early on but we did not actively engage the private sector and so we did not succeed,” she said.
Mrs. Asafo was optimistic that participation from the private sector would ensure the initiative’s sustainability.
“People have various ideas and backgrounds in assessing health services and no one intervention does it all, rather the people need to understand, no matter their background and where they are coming from to enable us develop and send the rights messages for adoption,” she said.
Prof. Elsie Effah Kaufmann, Chairperson of the National ICC-HP, said that the effective coordination of health promotion initiatives at all levels and among stakeholders was critical to achieving the desired outcomes.
She noted that there had been several initiatives to promote health throughout the years, but none of them had achieved significant results due to a lack of coordination and synergy among implementing agencies.
Prof. Kaufmann emphasized the need for collaborative initiatives and activities to ensure appropriate documentation of actions, make better use of limited resources, and improve Ghanaians’ well-being.
“What we are doing is to look at everything holistically, so we have the health promotion division of the GHS that has come up with a strategy and they need us as a committee to be an advisory Committee to help implement that strategy.”
Since its inception in July 2023, the Committee has held 12 meetings.
It also established regional ICC-HPs and carried out several health promotion campaigns, including Anthrax, rabies, and food safety awareness, among others.
