Health Minister Dr.George Sipa-Adjah Yankey says said capacity building, promotion of networking, technology transfer and experience sharing between developed and developing countries were strategic tools for promoting quality healthcare delivery.

“What the developing world needs now is a faster and effective way to generate, share and translate knowledge into effective and affordable interventions and strategies that make healthcare accessible to the most needy and vulnerable people in society,” he said.

Dr. Yankey was speaking at the end of the 2009 Annual Ministerial Review (AMR) of Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) Regional meeting for Africa on e-health.

The two-day meeting, under the auspices of the UN Economic and Social Council brought together more than 100 participants including health ministers, experts, policy makers and non governmental organizations to assess the utilization of ICT to respond adequately to health challenges faced by the continent.

It comes against the background that health systems in Africa suffer from fragmentation, shortages of trained human resources, weak information systems, lack of good governance and financial constraints.

Mainstreaming e-health into health systems is considered to be one of the promising solutions to many challenges the region faces.

The meeting is part of Africa’s preparation for the ECOSOC annual ministerial review to be held in Geneva early next month on the theme; “Implementing the internationally agreed goals and commitment in regard to global public health.”

Dr Yankey urged African countries to strike a balance between continuing pilot programmes and initiating modest sector wide, countrywide and to some extent, continent wide initiatives aimed at making small but concrete and incremental health gains for their populations.

“We have seen how satellite technology has been harnessed for services in remote areas so what we need now is not to give up but scale up and take a stand against pilot programmes and experiments and work towards systematic expansion of selected initiatives on the ground,” he added.

Dr. Yankey said e-health holds a lot of promise for making the big strides urgently needed for improving the health of our communities especially those in rural areas.

Miss Sylvie Lucas, Permanent representative of Luxembourg to United Nations and President of ECOSOC, said the provision of needed infrastructure, development of human resources, strengthening of regional integration, as well as continuous and enhanced international support in global ,financial, trading and communication networks were critical areas that required attention in formulating health and development strategies.


Source: GNA