Mr Gerard Duijfjes, The Royal Netherlands Ambassador, on Friday led a team of health partners to sign an Aide Memoire to climax the 2012 Health Summit held in Accra.

The document between the Ministry of Health and the partners emanated from the business meetings of the summit and contains resolutions, re-affirmations and commitments of the partners towards the sector's goals of providing quality healthcare for Ghanaians, and to assist the health sector with interventions to address the challenges identified in achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015.

The Summit on the theme: “Going Beyond Strategy to Action; All Hands on Deck for Millennium Development Acceleration Framework,” presented the health sector and its partners, stakeholders and civil society an opportunity to review the sector’s performance over last year, and access whether the levels of performance conformed to the levels of investment made over the period.

Mr Alban Kinsford Sumana Bagbin, Minister of Health, expressed gratitude to the health partners and other stakeholders for exhibiting high levels of commitment and resolution to find lasting solutions to the sector's challenges.

He indicated that although Ghana had achieved tremendous successes in various areas of healthcare delivery, there was still a long way to go to achieve the MDGs by the stipulated date.

“However, with this renewed commitment, I am optimistic that Ghana will be able to overcome the numerous challenges and forge ahead at a faster rate in order to attain sustainable healthcare for her people,” he said.

Mr Bagbin admitted that the health sector in Ghana had both the professional expertise as well as architectural designs to deliver quality services to the people and urged stakeholders to work hard towards the set targets.

He expressed the hope that the sector would present a success story by its review meeting next year.

Mr Duijfjes, who spoke on behalf of the health partners, explained that, the meeting was able to map out interventions and strategies to address the various concerns raised by stakeholders on various areas of healthcare which needed urgent interventions.

Mr Duijfjes said concerns were raised on Maternal and Child Health, Regional variations in HIV prevalence, as well as low investments in Family Planning and improvement, the current access rate, since improved family planning had a link with reducing maternal mortality.

He expressed worry over the sustainability of the National Health Insurance Scheme for the long term, and described it as “being at risk” and called for the need to scale up interventions to at least to meet MDG 5.

Mr Duijfjes called on all partners and stakeholders to join efforts and rally behind the theme to ensure its long term sustainability to improve healthcare service delivery and meet the MDGs, which were barely three years away.**