Ghana

Dr. Eno Biney is an emergency medicine specialist at the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital in Kumasi, the second-largest city in Ghana. She’s part of a new cohort of health workers that are changing the way emergency care happens in the country.

See Dr. Eno Biney on the cover of Impact magazine. This issue is all about health workers.

“I chose to specialize in emergency medicine because I realized that it was one of the most lacking specialties in our country,” Eno says. “There wasn’t any form of organized emergency treatment of patients.”

Instead, Ghanaians injured in accidents or suffering from medical, surgical, or obstetric emergencies were rushed to feebly equipped emergency care centers that didn’t have specially trained health workers or triaging systems in place. During her medical training, Eno saw the resulting delays in diagnosis and treatment—and lost lives. Read more »

This post was originally published on the IntraHealth International blog.

Garden City University College is a private nursing school in Kumasi, Ghana, where I spent six weeks this summer assessing the school’s progress toward improving its management practices. During my time at Garden City, I heard from several people that Ghana’s government is reluctant to work with private schools, and concerned that private schools are training subpar nurses.

Hearing this—both from members of the public and from people within the private school—was discouraging. Ghana is one of 57 countries that have a significant shortage of health workers¹. In Ghana there are only about 10 nurses and midwives and one physician for every 10,000 people—numbers that fall far below the World Health Organization’s recommendations. Public institutions cannot fill the gap on their own. Read more »

I’m afraid of snakes. It’s such a clichéd fear that I’m a little ashamed to admit it, but there it is. Hiking on a steep and winding trail recently, I turned a corner and almost stomped on a giant snake. I shudder to think what would have happened if I hadn’t seen it at the last second.

In Accra, Ghana, one person’s reptilian encounter didn’t turn out so lucky. A very poisonous species bit him and he went into shock. The snakebite would have been fatal. Fortunately, a health worker was there to save his life. Read more »

Working on the CapacityPlus project, I’m always excited to see capacity-building in action and hear how local leaders are strengthening the health workforce. Recently I learned about a terrific story from West Africa and wanted to help share it.

Building local ability to gather and use data
At the Health Information System Unconference in Accra, CapacityPlus’s Dykki Settle interviewed Kayode Odusote of the West African Health Organization (WAHO). Professor Odusote is helping WAHO’s member countries gather and use health worker data to make decisions about the health workforce.

In this piece from the CapacityPlus Voices series, Professor Odusote talks about a successful pilot in Ghana using iHRIS software. He emphasizes that the capacity-building aspect of WAHO’s partnership with our project is really what he values. “It’s a technical partnership,” he points out, “and basically for me that is much more than money. If you can build a core nucleus of local capacity,” he says, that has everything to do with sustainability. Read more »