CALL FOR LINKAGE BETWEEN RESEARCH, HEALTH POLICY (p.34) 03-09-08

Story: Kofi Yeboah

THE Deputy Minister of Health, Dr Mrs Gladys Norley Ashietey, has stressed the need for a link between research and health policy, planning and service delivery to enable the country to achieve its Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) on health.
She observed that Ghana might not be able to achieve the MDGs on health unless the weak health systems and infrastructure were addressed.
“We need to continuously review our health policies and work towards strengthening and re-orienting our health systems to perform, especially under situations of severe resource constraints,” she said.
Dr Mrs Ashietey made the remark in Accra yesterday when she opened a two-day conference on a “Ghanaian-Dutch collaboration for health research and development”.
It is being organised by the Health Research Unit (HRU) of the Ghana Health Service (GHS).
The participants are discussing the findings of a five-year collaborative health research project and the relevance of research to the improvement of health delivery.
Topics being discussed include “Sustainable research for development”, “Health care financing”, “Improving the quality of health service”, and “The partnership and policy issues”.
Dr Mrs Ashietey re-iterated the need for an increased investment in health research, in view of its relevance to improvement in the health delivery system.
“There is enough evidence to show that policies that are rooted in well-organised research have always stood the test of time. But in our special circumstances, we need a faster and more effective way to better generate knowledge, better share knowledge and better translate it into effective and affordable interventions and strategies that make health care accessible to the most needy and vulnerable,” she noted.
The deputy health minister, therefore, challenged research scientists, both in the public and private sectors to collaborate in their efforts towards helping address those challenges.
She said in order to make a difference, there was the need for innovation and capacity development to generate, review and implement appropriate interventions.
Dr Mrs Ashietey lauded the collaboration between Ghana and The Netherlands in the health research project and expressed the hope that it would continue.
Giving an overview of the project, the Director of the HRU, Prof. John Gyapong, said the project had three major thrusts - to better attune health research to the needs of policy makers and beneficiaries; to emphasise the need to strengthen national capacity for health research; and to address the imbalances in North-South collaborative research by promoting genuine research co-operation between Ghana and The Netherlands.
Seventy-three research proposals were sponsored under the project, covering the thematic areas of health financing, quality health care, health communication and decentralisation.
A former Minister of Development Co-operation in The Netherlands, Prof. Jan Pronk, who delivered the keynote address, said for research to achieve its intended goals, it had to be relevant, applicable in the short term, and related to the marginalised in society.
The Director-General of the GHS, Dr Elias Sory, who chaired the function, said the HRU was being transformed into a department and expressed the hope that it would get more funding to undertake further research projects.