He said the right to quality health services must be guaranteed irrespective of status, and that intensifying education on the Patient Charter was the driver of awareness towards ensuring quality health service delivery for all.

Mr Kamara, who was interacting with District Citizen Monitoring Committees (DCMCs) in the Nkwanta North District and Nkwanta South Municipality said "it is very important that people knew their rights. They need the voice to speak up for stakeholders to act", saying, it would help eliminate exploitation.

Mr Kamara said advocacy at the local level would affect the project at the national level and asked the DCMCs to intensify the education, particularly in hard to reach communities. The P4H is a five year USD 3.7 million project being executed by Send Ghana in collaboration with Penplusbytes, a governance non-governmental organisation and the Ghana News Agency, which had produced a reporting system to enable patients to voice out their concerns.

The reporting dashboard provides an end to end communication between patients and health providers, expected to be utilised to improve client service. The Chief of Party however observed that though the dashboard generated hundreds of feedbacks from patients, responses from health service workers was less than one per cent.

He said the low response could discourage patients from patronising the system, and made an appeal to health workers to consider the platform in their interest."The concept of the reporting platform is to improve and hasten interaction between patients and service providers. Unfortunately, this is not taking place", Mr Kamara noted.

He said the Ghana Health Service would be engaged on restructuring the system and encouraged health workers to respond to issues on the dashboard. Mr Kamara, who is also the Chief Executive of Send West Africa, called on health workers to study the Patient Charter, adding that, the material would be produced at durbars and other social events and for mass media distribution in different languages.

He said P4H would devise ways to make the citizenry more confident with the dashboard and promised refresher training for the DCMC members and health workers.

Mr Alfred Brobbey Frimpong, Administrator of the Kpasa Health Centre said the literacy rate in the area demanded more durbars and community engagements on the subject.  Prince Amponsah, Focal Person for the project in Nkwanta South noted that, illiteracy was hindering sensitisation in most target areas, and would require more non formal modes.

He said the dashboards when utilised could help address issues such as health worker attitude and shortage of drugs. A total of 20 districts in five regions have been selected and over 500 health facilities provided with copies of the charter and the nurses code of conduct.

The P4H targets communities where health delivery is poor and is also helping disadvantaged people to register and enrol on the National Health Insurance Scheme to access health services at zero cost.