Abstract
Ghana has made major strides in improving access to health services. Despite these improvements, Ghana did not meet the Millennium Development Goals 4 and 5. Quality of care is a major factor that could explain this shortfall. To understand current practice and to identify needs in the area of quality of care in Ghana for improving health outcomes and to guide the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) in supporting the care quality improvement efforts in Ghana. The directory of existing standards, guidelines and protocols of the Ghana Health Service was reviewed and sixteen in-depth interviews were conducted to identify interventions that addressed quality of care. Additional information was obtained during a NICE scoping visit to Accra followed by a study tour of Ghanaian stakeholders to NICE and to the National Health Service. Since 1988, 489 policy interventions have been identified that address quality of care. Among them, the development of health protocols and guidelines were the most frequent interventions (n=150), followed by health policies and strategies (n=106); interventions related to health information (n=77); development of training manuals and staff training (n=69); development of regulations (n=38) and interventions related to organisation of services (n=15). Ghana has made significant efforts in developing guidelines, policies and conducting in-service training. Supervision, monitoring and evaluation have also received attention. However, less effort has been made in developing processes and systems and involving communities and service users. Some recommendations were made to guide the future work on quality of care. Rockefeller Foundation.
Highlights
Ghana has made major strides in improving access to health care in the past decade
This paper reports on a study to help understand what is currently done and what the needs are in the area of quality of care in Ghana, with a view to identify priority areas for achieving and sustaining Universal healthcare, for improving health outcomes and to help National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) International and its Ghanaian partners identify opportunities for targeted, mutually beneficial engagements in this space
The Sector Medium Term Development Plan (SMTDP) 2010-2013 and 2014-2017 set the improvement of quality health service delivery as an objective, acknowledging that more has to be done in this area.[3, 22], Development aid plays a role in Ghana since late 1980 in supporting the access and the quality of health care
Summary
Ghana has made major strides in improving access to health care in the past decade. The number of doctors and nurses per population has increased.[1] There has been an increase in coverage by health facilities and Community-based Health Planning and Services has been promoted as a strategy to support communitybased primary health care.[2, 3] In 2003, the National. Inequity in accessing health care services has been highlighted as one of the problems that needs to be addressed to improve health outcomes in Ghana.[1, 7] The distribution of human resources and health facilities varies among and within regions.[8] Urban populations and richer households are more likely to have a valid www.ghanamedj.org Volume 50 Number 4 December 2016
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