The Director General of the Ghana Health Service (GHS), Dr Elias Sory, has cautioned doctors, who refuse postings to rural areas that, they could face sanctions.
Dr Sory said those doctors normally try to make arrangements to stay in the city with the intention of doing private work in other hospitals.
The Director General said this, when he addressed the staff of the Bolgatanga Health Directorate on Friday. He said the situation was seriously affecting health delivery in the deprived areas, especially, in the three Northern Regions.
Dr Sory appealed to the doctors to accept postings to the deprived areas, explained that, those were the places where they could acquire more experience, saying that, he accepted postings to anywhere in the country and that helped make him what he is today.
He asked Managers of the Health Directorate to report all doctors who refuse postings to rural areas to his Directorate for the appropriate sanctions and that the GHS would not allow doctors to have their way.
He was not happy with the way some health personnel handle their patients, especially in the area of customer care, saying that, as health officials, they should "display a sense of empathy and not a sense of economic gains"
Dr. Sory said the Directorate would adopt what he termed "reward and sanction methods", which his outfit would use to assess health workers who handle their patients well for promotions.
He appealed to all health workers to work in unity, saying that, one of the major challenges pulling them back from fully achieving their set targets was disunity among health staff.
On the performance of the Upper East Directorate of the GHS, the Director General commended them for being the best in the area of attaining nutritional status of children and also recording lower maternal mortality.
He paid tribute to Dr. John Koku Awoonor-Williams for his visionary leadership by bringing innovations into health development.
He cited the Community Help Planning (CHPS) Compound, which sought to take healthcare delivery to the doorsteps of community members, as one of the innovative plans that had worked perfectly and that other African countries were trooping to the country to learn some of the good methods in health delivery.
He also mentioned the tremendous role the Navrongo Research Centre was playing in health delivery and indicated that Nigerians have been frequenting the centre to learn.
He advised people from the Region not to shy away from serving their people and lamented that there were natives, who were health professionals, but have refused to stay and work in the region.
Dr Sory said with the upgrading of the Tamale Teaching Hospital and the proposed improvement of the status of the Bolgatanga Regional Hospital to train medical students, the problem of lack of health personnel in the Region would be reduced in the long term.