In Ghana, MOH, GHS and their stakeholders will commemorate the day with a national launch on Wednesday April 11 at the Ministry of Information Conference Room at 0930 hours. There will also be a Press Conference on April 11 to mark the occasion as well as sensitise the public on Ghana’s efforts towards the attainment of Universal Health Coverage (UHC) as well as the Sustainable Development Goals.

This year’s World Health Day aims at shining a spotlight on the need for UHC and the advantages it can bring, a statement signed by Mr Robert Cudjoe, the Public Relations Officer of the MOH and copied to the Ghana News Agency in Accra on Sunday has said.

It said every year, Ghana joined the rest of the World in commemorating World Health Day; a very important day for the World Health Organisation (WHO) as it is the anniversary of the founding of the Organisation.

It said the day also provided a unique opportunity to mobilise action around a specific health topic of concern to people all over the world. It said, the WHO was founded on the principle that all people should be able to realise their right to the highest possible level of health.

   The statement said:  “Health for all has therefore been the guiding vision for more than seven decades. It’s also the motivation behind the current organisation-wide drive to support countries in moving towards UHC.”

According to the statement, in WHOs 70th year, World Health Day focused on “Universal health coverage: everyone, everywhere” - ensuring that everyone, everywhere could access essential quality health services without facing financial hardship.

It explained that Health for All was to promote UHC by 2030 with the aim of supporting policy-makers, civil society organisations, individuals and media in the journey to bring UHC to every country.

“It is something all countries committed to when they agreed on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015,” the statement said.  The statement mentioned that UHC would enable everyone to receive the services that addressed the most important causes of diseases and death and ensured that the quality of those services was good enough to improve the health of the people who received them.

“UHC is not only about a minimum, “essential”, package of health services, but also about ensuring people receive better health services and financial protection as more resources become available. “UHC is not only about health services for individuals, but also includes services for whole populations such as public health campaigns –for example, adding iodine to salt to get iodated salt to address problems of goitre and other iodine deficiency diseases. ,” it said.

 The statement nted that, over the past few years there has been some improvement in access to health care in Ghana, although there were still many challenges to the achievement of UHC.

It therefore recommended that, for Ghana to move towards UHC, the country needed to find more money thus strengthening the financing and coverage of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), to expand access to health care services and to raise the quality of care.

“These would include; addressing the inequitable distribution of human resources and equipment and improving the management and administrative capacity of the NHIS. The Community Health Planning Services programme, which is designed to provide a close-to-client service, needs to be expanded,” it added.

The statement commended Ghana for having a Primary health care services which were closer to the people and were within reach of the poor. “Ghana has already made significant progress towards UHC, but there are still Ghanaians who are unable to obtain the health services they need,” it said.