Garu, (U/E), Sept. 03, GNA - The Upper East Regional Directorate of the Ghana Health Service (GHS), is embarking on a regional campaign to sensitize its staff on customer care in order to attract more patients to its facilities.

This has been necessitated by recent decline in patient attendance to some key public health facilities in the region following recent upsurge in private health facilities.

The decline has partly been attributed to the lack of customer care skills by health providers from the GHS, thereby affecting service delivery and trust from members of the public who hitherto considered public health facilities as their first choice in seeking medical care. All nine districts in the region are expected to present 50 participants each to be schooled on topics such as "Good Customer Care and Customer Relations", "Patient Rights and the Code of Ethics of the Service" and "Communication Skills".

At a ceremony to kick start the programme in the Garu-Tempane District, Mr Gaston Bozie, Regional Health Promoter at the Regional Health Directorate, said it had become necessary to organize such programmes to sensitize staff following keen competition in health care delivery in the region.

Mr Bozie said the Regional Director of Health Services, Dr Koku Awonor-Williams, was particularly concerned about the way and manner patients should be handled in the face of stiff competition, especially when service delivery was involved. He indicated that the idea was also to get health staff to understand the modalities in customer care so that they could add more innovative skills in dealing with patients who patronized GHS facilities.

Mr Eric Kwadjo Amoh, a facilitator at the workshop who treated topics on customer care and communications, acknowledged that good customer care and good communication skills were vital to boost the trust in patients and increase their confidence in the services they received.

He said the health sector, like any other service provider, had employees such as medical doctors, nurses and medical assistants who were well trained.

Mr Amoh, however, said they needed to be schooled to handle patients as though they were offering a service worth paying for. "Like the modern services bankers offer, you need to organize yourselves in a more customer friendly manner to attract and keep patients to your facilities," he said. 03 Sept. 09