Deputy Director General of the Ghana Health Service, Dr. Anthony Ofosu, has told Regional and District Health Directorates that “Lessons learnt from research on specific challenges of the health care delivery system should be used to improve programme implementation for the general good of the Health system,” and that enough data exists in the routine District Health Information Management System (DHIMS2) to resolve implementation challenges at the district level and to improve health care delivery and quality of life in the communities they serve.
Dr. Ofosu was addressing officials of regional and district Health Directorates of the Volta and Oti regions during an online workshop via Zoom organized by the Institute of Health Research (IHR) of University of Health and Allied Sciences, Ho. This workshop on “Proposal writing using the District Health Information Management System (DHIMS)” is part of a three-year project funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and aims to strengthen the capacity of District Health Management teams to use DHIMS data in engaging stakeholders for effective decision-making.
In her presentation, Professor Margaret Gyapong, Director of IHR and Principal Investigator on the project, urged participants to put into practice the skills and experiences acquired through this workshop to enhance their proposal writing skills to enable them use evidence from their research to inform decision making in the delivery of health services.
Deputy Volta Regional Director of Health Services, Dr. Senanu Kwesi Djokoto, expressed his gratitude to UHAS and the facilitators for their respective roles, and highly commended participants for their commitment to remain throughout the sessions at a time when many of them were multi-tasking due to the Covid19 pandemic.
In his concluding remarks, Dr. Anthony Ofosu, in turn, commended the Regional Health Directorate for collaborating with IHR for the workshop. He particularly praised Dr. Djokoto for his role in diligently mobilising the teams from the districts throughout the period of the workshop.
Although the original face-to-face workshop was planned for only three districts in the Volta Region, it was opened to all districts and the regional health directorates of the two regions when IHR decided to organise it via the Zoom platform. The three-day workshop ran from May 27 through May 29 and drew close to 100 participants from 18 districts and five sub districts of Volta and Oti regions. Research fellows and assistants at IHR were embedded as scientists in the various districts to support them.