The Upper West Regional Director of the National Health Insurance Authority, Mr Samuel Lobber, has said inadequate staffing was affecting efforts of the authority to achieve a100 per cent coverage of the scheme.
He mentioned specifically Lawra, Jirapa and Sissala East Municipalities as well as Nadowi-Kaelo and Wa West Districts as some of the assemblies that had issues with inadequate staff.
“In the year under review which is 2022, mobile renewal reduced from 35 per cent in 2021 to 32 and this is because in some of the remote areas, people still need assistance with how to undertake the mobile renewal and this can be done effectively by our staff but this is a case where we have only four people serving a whole district, how many will remain in the office and how many will move to the field,” he said.
Mr Lobber said this during the annual performance review of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) at Wa on Monday.
The meeting which was used to take stock of performance and analyse the targets for the year and how to achieve them was on the theme; ‘Sustaining our gains on Universal Health Care- a collective responsibility.’
The Regional Director explained that the introduction of the mobile renewal and other electronic services has not adequately made up for the staff deficiency because there was still the need to embark on community outreach to ensure that people were able to patronise and use the electronic platforms.
“We realise that day in day out more people need assistance with renewing their membership using the phone and you cannot imagine four staff in a district serving over 6,000 residents,” he said.
He mentioned that although the region was the first in the country to attain its annual universal health coverage target for 2022, the achievement was made possible through the hard work of the few staff available and said some of them had to double task or work overtime and on weekends to be able to make the successes possible.
Incredibly, the Director stated that the region was among the two in the country that has achieved its UHC with the registration of 81 per cent of residents and was hoping to increase its coverage this year.
“Currently, 744,721 residents are registered with the scheme and that includes 227,802 indigents, hence we were unable to achieve our revenue target because the region is considered as one of the poorest in the country,” he said.
The manager said that the office in the region was able to mobilise a total of GH₵4,396,863.58 representing 59 per cent of the targeted revenue of GH₵7,396,856.49.
“We are doing low revenue at the moment because many of our districts have a lot of clients who are considered indigent and need to be registered without payment, so that is exactly what we have done but we are not resting on our oars; we are working around the clock to increase our revenue mobilisation,” he added.
For his part, the Director in charge of the Northern Belt of the Scheme, Mr Titus Sory commended the staff for the achievement and for holding the forth over the years to ensure the Upper West Region remained one of the best performing regions in
FROM LYDIA DARLINGTON FORDJOUR, WA
