Health Minister, Kwaku Agyemang-Manu, has decried the rate at which health professionals are sued by the public for alleged poor service delivery and medical negligence at some facilities in the country.
Mr Agyemang-Manu, addressing senior managers of the Ghana Health Service at a meeting in Kumasi, said his office has in the past weeks received letters from the Attorney General’s office of people suing medical practitioners over some services they rendered.
The Minister is worried about the recent trend saying such cases were becoming common.
“What I’m seeing in the Ministry are issues of litigations. For the past few weeks, almost every week, at least we get one letter from the Attorney General’s office. Somebody has sued a staff or doctor with problems with care or service delivery, and they want us to come out with information to go to court. Earlier on, when I came, the issues were not that much, but it’s becoming very common.”
He asked: “So what is it? Deliberate efforts to try to go to court? Or for us to go to court? Have we forgotten how we were trained to be professionals? Negligence or what’s happening? Since you are senior managers of care of what we do in health, discuss how these court matters can be resolved,”
He also tasked the health care providers to ensure the National Health Insurance Policy achieves the purpose for which it was initiated.
“The poor woman in the rural areas who do not have money to pay for service, please begin to think of them as well. My plea is NHIS delays, but why do we extort monies from the poor patients? You understand what catastrophic expenditures are,” the Health Minister complained.