NHIS records low response in the Upper West

Lawra, April 23, GNA - Mr Moses Dani Baah, the Deputy Minister of Private Sector Development and President's Special Initiatives, has expressed concern about the low response to the National Health Insurance Scheme in the Upper west Region and urged chiefs and opinion leaders to mobilize the people for sensitisation on the scheme. He said the scheme was designed to enable the poor to have quick access to health delivery without any difficulty and saw no reason why communities in the region should be adopting a lukewarm attitude to it. Mr Dani Baah was a addressing a People's Assembly at Lawra.

He expressed regret that while 65 districts had started the scheme, it was still in its embryo stage in some of the districts in the region with the Lawra District registering only 1,500 people.

"We are very poor and we should therefore take the scheme very seriously than our counterparts in other districts", he said. Other issues that featured prominently at the forum included the cap 30 pension scheme, refusal of drivers operating in the district to charge approved fares and lack of teachers in the district. Mr Ambrose Dery, the Regional Minister, said the small town pipe water systems for Lawra and Nandom would start this year while that of Babile would begin at the end of the year.

He said the assembly spent 180 million cedis on HIV/AIDS, Roll Back Malaria, polio immunization programmes in the district during the year, On agriculture, Mr Dery said the assembly supported 83 farmers to grow cowpea, soya beans and groundnuts with 1,194 farmers benefiting from 1,431 bags of fertilizer, 797 farmers had a variety of seeds and 875 had hoe blades.