Effective Public Health Supply System Required

Mr Samuel Boateng Director in charge of Procurement and Supply at the Ministry of Health on Tuesday said Ghana needs an effective public health supply chain to provide health workers and clients with vital health commodities. This, he said, will require that competent staff was empowered to make decisions that will positively impact supply chain operations. Mr Boateng said this at the opening of a three day training of trainers� workshop for participants from Ghana, Liberia and Sierra Leone in Accra. The training is jointly organized by the Ministry of Health and Sanofi Aventis Groupe, to strengthen the capacity of participants and enhance the skills of all parties in the supply chain of medicines at both national and regional levels. He noted owing to the existing bottlenecks around supply chain, most medicines and other health products were not reaching their target population on time, in the right quantity and quality. He explained that though knowledge and experience on effective health products and medicines were spreading rapidly worldwide, it remained disparate and frequently unavailable to decision-makers. �Though much has been invested in ensuring the supply chain managers have the skills and tools to carry out their responsibilities, they lacked the enabling environment and direction to effect real change within the supply chain system,� he added. Mr Boateng noted that the Ministry of Health has developed a five-year master plan for the public health sector commodity supply chain, to transform the health supply from a non-performing system, to one that would guarantee ready access to good quality and affordable health commodities. Mr Francois Desbrandes, Deputy Director, in Charge of Sales Operations Access to Medicines of Sanofi, noted that participants would be taken through the eight models jointly developed by the Ministry of Health and Sanofi. The models would be on Identifying and quantifying needs, tracking evaluating and auditing medicines supply chain, medicines supply chain activity reports and organizing medicines logistics in health care centres. The rest would be training warehouse supervisors in managing pharmaceutical products, stock management, medicines quality assurances, medicines procurement and post training supervision in medicines logistics. He said the training will help participants to improve the management of health products and health services.