Ketema Bizuneh making a presentation at the workshop
The Ghana Health Service (GHS) will soon roll out a new tool by which community members can rate the services of health facilities in their communities.
The adoption of the electronic tool — Community Score Card (CSC) — by the GHS forms part of mechanisms to ensure transparent monitoring of health facilities and also strengthen healthcare service delivery across the country.
Addressing stakeholders at a validation workshop in Accra, Dr Isabella Sagoe-Moses, Deputy Director of Reproductive & Child Health Unit, GHS, stated that the CSC will be the qualitative monitoring tool for performance rating of health facilities, evaluation of services and discussions of health issues in communities.
She further added that the CSC which was designed to get communities interested in healthcare delivery also provides the communities with an opportunity to detect health indicators that are not doing well and take actions to do better.
Dr Sagoe-Moses mentioned that the CSC which will be rolled out nationally adds to the already existing reproductive, maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health (RMNCAH) and the malaria control score cards which are facility-based.
Emmanuel Ayire, Programmes Manager at the Family Health Division, GHS, explaining how the CSC tool will be applied, explained that every electoral area will have a community health management committee with members responsible for quarterly assessment of healthcare services in the area.
He added that the committee members will then input the ratings in categories such as respectful and compassionate care, waiting time at the facility, availability to medicines and diagnosis tools, cleanliness and safety of the facility.
“Every community member will be given access so that they will know the rating that they did and will actually reflect what is in the system. So when that is done, there will be the need for further information on why that rating was done and that can be discussed in the community health management committee meetings.
There will also be durbars that will bring the community members together to discuss happenings in the community,” he said.
Ketema Bizuneh, representative of Africa Leaders Malaria Alliance (ALMA), pointed out the CSC would track national and sub-national performance, prioritise high-impact indicators selected by the country and provide strategies and roadmaps at the community level.
He, however, said that the CSC is not a comprehensive inclusion of all available indicators, a static tool that cannot be changed, a complex analysis tool that calculates indicators and a stand-alone programme.
Between 2012 and 2017, 29 African countries had developed Score Cards (SC) with 25 at the implementation stage of the SC for malaria control and elimination.
By Jamila Akweley Okertchiri