The Ghana Heath Service Community-Based Health Planning and Services (CHPS) is a national strategy to deliver essential community -based health services involving health planning and service delivery with communities.
Its primary focus is communities in deprived sub-districts and bringing health services close to these communities.
Considered one of the pragmatic strategies for achieving universal health coverage of a basic package of essential primary health services, CHPS has gained international recognition. Led by a Community Health Officer and supported by volunteers drawn from the area of service, the CHPS strategy is a breakthrough in enhancing community involvement and ownership of primary health care interventions towards achieving universal health coverage (UHC).
It is in this light that a Takoradi based philanthropist decided to give back to the society by providing a health post for the market women with permission from city authorities.
The Takoradi market circle area best known by the Sekondi Takoradi Metropolitan Assembly as the Central Business District (CBD) play host to all the major businesses in the Western Region of Ghana. Talk of the small medium enterprises, cooperate entities like the Banks as well as petty traders who sell in and around the Takoradi Market Circle.
With over nine hundred and eighty six (986) traders in the market, more than one thousand (1000) people troop in and out of the Takoradi market area on a daily bases to engage in one trade or the other.
The Metro works engineer Mr. William Tei-Kpoti tells me it’s extremely important for the assembly to constructs a health post for the market but money to execute the idea has always been a hindrance.
But according to the Metro Health Director, Mrs. Joyce K. Bagina Sutherland, it’s needful for a big community like the Takoradi Market to have a clinic that will attend to the immediate health needs of the people who spend most of their lives in and around the central Business District of Takoradi trading.
Right now we have some community health nurses in the Takoradi Market sitting at a place which is not conducive at all, they are just sacrificing. I believe our mothers and children in the market should be given a special attention there by deciding to take health care delivery services to at least breast feeding mothers.
According to her, the decision by a philanthropist who wrote to the assembly to provide a space at the market to enable him give the Takoradi Market a health post as a social responsibility comes as a big relieve to her and the Sekondi-Takoradi Metropolitan Assembly as a whole.
Providing a clinic for Takoradi Market has been on the assembly’s programmes long before I was transferred to STMA but budgetary constraints from one year to the other keep making that vision unattainable until this philanthropist came in to help.
Traders in the Takoradi Market who could not hide their joy upon hearing that the huge fabricated container that sits within the inner perimeter of the Takoradi Market circle between the Fire Service Station and the black market is a health post being provided for them by a philanthropist rained praises on the said philanthropist for his benevolence.
But for Mrs. Sutherland, the Metro Health Director, the realization of a health post at the Takoradi Market is a dream come through and she will forever be grateful to the said philanthropist for his timely intervention.
Though major works on the newly constructed health post in the Takoradi Market is completed, the facility is yet to be connected to electricity and stocked with equipment’s to aid in it smooth operation.
The Metro Works Engineer, Mr. Tei-Kpoti hinted that traders in the market should expect the facility to commence operation in by the end of January 2018.
Meanwhile Spicefmonline.com is reliably inform that the said philanthropist has already sunk about hundred thousand Ghana cedis (GHc100,000) into the whole project and he’s yet to spend more since there are some outstanding installations to be done before the commencement of the operation.
The philanthropist we also know from a deep throat source that, has pledge to support for the cost in use of the health post though it will be run by the Ghana Health Service.
And we can equally confirm that the Takoradi Health Post will be named after the said philanthropist.
Kojo Ennimil Arthur/Beachfmonline.com/Ghana
