The National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA) has instituted financial audits into the operations of the National Insurance Health Scheme (NHIS), Mr. Sylvester Mensah, the Chief Executive has disclosed.
He said the auditing would inform the Authority about the state of the financial operations of the scheme to enable it to make appropriate recommendations to ensure prudent spending of premiums.
Mr. Mensah said this here on Friday when he addressed a stakeholder�s forum on the NHIS. The meeting, organized by the NHIA, attracted managers of district-wide Mutual Health Insurance schemes, District Directors of Health Services, Regional and District Medical Directors and traditional rulers. It would, among other things, access the successes and failures of the scheme and map out appropriate strategies to improve health care delivery to people.
Mr. Mensah gave the assurance that the Authority had no intention to sack scheme managers. He said his tour of the regions had revealed that most of the scheme managers had the competence to run the scheme. Mr. Mensah said the NHIA would soon establish a call centre where people aggrieved by the operations of service providers and other scheme operatives could lodge complaints for prompt redress.
He called on staff of the mutual scheme to be guided by the principles of probity, accountability and transparency which are the hall marks of the scheme. The Deputy Minister of Health, Dr. Benjamin Kumbuor, described the NHIS as an important cornerstone to quality health care delivery and said the government is working towards streamlining it to make it function more effectively and efficiently in the best interest of the people.
The Regional Minister, Mahmud Khalid, called on the participants to take the forum seriously and come out with appropriate mechanisms to strengthen the scheme. The Regional Manager of the scheme, John Bosco Zury, in an overview of the scheme�s operations, said as at the close of December 2008, the region registered 463,039 people out of a total regional population of 659,051. Sissala East District Scheme, he said, attained the highest coverage with a total of 45, 051 clients out of a population of 51, 782.
Source: Ghanaian Times
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