INTERNATIONAL FORUM FOR MEDICAL ASSISTANTS OPENS (PAGE 23, OCT 3)

THE Second International Forum for Physicians or Medical Assistants (MAs) from Ghana, United States of America (USA), the Netherlands and the United Kingdom (UK), among other countries, has opened in Sunyani.
Speaking at the function, the Deputy Brong Ahafo Regional Minister, Mr Eric Opoku, appealed to the participants and indeed all workers and professionals not to refuse posting to the rural communities.
He said, “It is embarrassing to see foreign health volunteers working in our deprived communities while our own people, for various reasons, refuse posting to these areas.”
The forum, which first took place in Savannah, Atlanta, Georgia in the USA, is more of a peer to peer dialogue to fashion out best practices based on common experiences and challenges of PAs or MAs as they were called in Ghana.
It is also to brainstorm on the development of common training modules so as to harmonise the curricula of institutions that train PAs in the collaborating countries as well as strategise to meet the ever-increasing needs of the growing marginalised population.
The two-day forum being attended by 25 participants, including nurses, paramedical health providers, representatives from the Ministry of Health (MoH), the Ghana Health Service (GHS) and private Health Training Institutions, has as its theme: “Education for service: Learning from each other”.
Mr Opoku observed that in the countryside, the MAs had been the main drivers of primary healthcare delivery, adding that sometimes they worked under very trying conditions and often without the basic logistics, thus making their profession one of the most sacrificial and risky in most cases.
Mr Opoku said it could train more of them and other middle-level health professionals to work and improve health outcomes in the rural areas because that was where majority of the population in the productive sector lived to work.
The Director of the Kintampo RHTS, Dr E.T. Adjase, explained further that the forum was to cross-fertilise ideas by learning from one another to strengthen the health system in the various countries and also improve health coverage to rural and under-served communities in the respective countries forming the forum.
The Brong Ahafo Regional Director of Health Services, Dr Aaron Offei, stated that since doctors could not be found everywhere in the countries engaged in the forum, including the USA, there was the need to train such calibre of PAs or MAs to serve in the periphery of those countries.
According to Dr Offei, close collaboration between clinical physicians and MAs was very crucial in the health delivery system in the country, stressing that the existence of the RHTS was very important, since the institution was providing healthcare delivery for the rural areas in the country.
An associate professor of the University of Birmingham, Nick Ross, also stated that the forum was initiated to look out for what the various countries had and subsequently exchange ideas.
He said the brain drain of health personnel from Africa, the USA and Europe was not the best, emphasising that “we want to look at what we have in common and also to know the core definition of the forum”.