She stated that, telemedicine in rural areas would aid nurses fast communicate with highly trained doctors at the district hospital to report cases and get prescriptions for paramedics in critical conditions.

According to her, non-communicable diseases were becoming prevalent in low and middle income countries, and people in rural areas needed to travel distances to hospital to be diagnosed and receive treatment.

“Some of the medicines used to treat hypertension, diabetes, needed to be prescribed by a highly trained physician or doctor, and we do not have enough of such healthcare providers in our Community-Based Health Planning and Services that dominate in our rural communities, so if people in these communities need to be diagnosed, they have to travel, cross rivers to get to the nearest hospital to do so.”

“If there is telemedicine, where nurses in CHPS compounds can just pick a phone and call a doctor at the district level to get prescriptions for these patients it would be a good initiative,” she noted.

Prof. Agyepong made the recommendation at the NIHR Global Health Research Centre for Non-Communicable Disease Control in West Africa (STOP-NCD) national-level stakeholders’ meeting in Accra yesterday.

In October 2022, NIHR in the United Kingdom (UK) provided a £10million to fund a research in Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) in three West African countries, which included Ghana, Burkina Faso and Niger.

The research was to scale-up effort aimed at combatting the scourge of NCDs over five years in the countries.

The research comprise GCPS and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), Ashesi University in Ghana, Catholic University of West Africa (UCAO-UUB), Burkina Faso and Laboratoire d’Etudes et de Recherche sur les Dynamiques Sociales et le Développement Local (LASDEL), Niger.

The meeting was to discuss ‘Information Brief: Primary Health Care for Hypertension, Diabetes and Mental Health in Ghana, Situational Analysis findings.’

She noted that, for the past two decades, there has been considerable progress in the development of policies for NCD, however, there were several gaps related to core health system functions including financing, health information and data management systems, Human Resources and services delivery.

The 10 randomly selected districts in the Greater Accra and Eastern regions where survey was conducted showed that there were more CHPS compounds in the Eastern Region as compared to Greater Accra, representing 72 per cent and 17 per cent respectively, 23 per cent of health centres in the Eastern Region as compared to 49 per cent in Greater Accra Region.

It also indicated that, polyclinics were 16 per cent and two per cent in the Greater Accra and Eastern regions respectively while district hospitals and hospitals were 18 per cent in the Greater Accra Region and two per cent in the Eastern Region.

In her remarks, a member of the stop NCD Advisory Committee, Dr Sylvia Anie said bringing key stakeholders to dialogue on good practices with regards to no-communicable diseases was timely and essential.

Dr Anie who is Co-chair of WHO Expert Panel on Sexual and Reproductive Health, added “This is an excellent forum for sharing findings and situational analyses on NCDs, discussing NCD control, education, promotion and screening for hypertension, diabetes and mental health intervention in Ghana.”

She said NCDs were a major public health challenge globally and estimates indicated that the diseases were the leading causes of mortality, accounting for 41 million deaths annually.

“Let’s collectively ensure that we move forward with the information gained from this stakeholders forum to ensure improved outcomes as we address NCD prevention, control and treatment,” Dr Anie said.