The forum was on the theme: “Health for All: Primary Healthcare as a Pathway to Universal Health Coverage”. Madam Vicky T. Okine, the Executive Director of the Alliance for Reproductive Health Rights, said a strong primary health care and an effective foundation of health systems could be beneficial to fully achieve the vision put forward in the Alma Ata Declaration of 1978, a vision of health for everyone and everywhere.

“Strong primary health care can manage 90 per cent of people’s health needs and provide a range of services including vaccinations, cancer screening and treatment for childhood diarrhoea, pneumonia and malaria,” she said.

Madam Okine said strong primary health care systems built trust between patients and providers and as a result her outfit had advocated women’s reproductive rights and had seen how often women and girls forwent health care because of social stigma and pressure.

She said while global efforts to improve primary health care had been slow due to a lack of data on primary health care systems the country was one of the few countries that already collected good data.Madam Okine said investing in quality primary health care was the most cost-effective way to improve the health of women and girls “and we need to work together to ensure that women and girls are no longer left behind”.

Mr Nathaniel Otoo, the Chief Executive Officer of National Health Insurance Authority, said the Sustainable Development Goals was a turning point for the country and it behooves on government to look at other finances to sustain the health system delivery.Mr Otoo said the country needed to work collectively to correct the health system and other contributory sectors since government was in the process of developing a universal health coverage policy.

Prof. Richard Adanu, the Dean of School of Public Health at the University of Ghana, noted that primary health care would be effective when it was able to provide the health needs of the citizenry, saying partnership was critical in addressing the issue.He explained that primary health care was different from primary level care and that primary health care focuses on food nutrition, maternal and child health services.

Participants were of the view that partnership in primary health care would be effective when there are strong leadership in place and need to have an agency that coordinates all policies in the health sector.They advocated that civil society organisations and research institutions could collaborate to collect timely data for decision making as well as invest in primary health care to achieve universal health coverage.