Health Promotion Officers in the Ashanti Region have undergone a day’s training on how to engage communities on risk communication as part of efforts to halt community spread of COVID-19 in the region.

The training was to build the capacity of participants to understand community engagement as health promotion and disease prevention strategy and also expose them to challenges in community engagement.

It formed part of the Regional Health Directorate’s risk communication strategies to reach out to the citizenry at the community level on the need to stay safe from the coronavirus pandemic.

Dr Emmanuel Tinkorang, the Regional Director of Health Services in his opening address, underlined the critical role of the officers to influence community members to adopt the right behaviours towards the fight against the pandemic.

He said it was their duty to make the people understand the nature of the disease and the risk it posed to the public if not well managed.

They must also provide timely feedback from their various districts to enable the regional directorate to put together a comprehensive report that would inform the formulation of effective strategies at the national level to contain the pandemic.

Mr Felix Frimpong, the Regional Health Promotion Officer entreated the participants to work closely with community leaders such as chiefs, unit committees, and assembly members to achieve the desired results.

This, he said, would ensure easy mobilization of people for community engagement and dissemination of information on the virus.

He said their role had become more crucial to the COVID-19 fight due to the increasing community spread in the region.

The Ashanti Region is the second epicenter of the coronavirus after the Greater Accra Region with 9,972 confirmed cases and 67 deaths recorded.