Accra, April 27, GNA - Dr. Sam Adjei, the Chief Executive of Centre for Health and Social Services (CHeSS), on Friday appealed to the private sector in health to come together to enable it engage government on policies that affect them.

He said it was unfortunate that despite its contribution to the health care delivery in country, engagement with the private sector was very low. Dr Adjei identified mutual suspicion and mistrust between public and private actors and operation in each own silos as some of the challenges that confront them.

Presenting a paper on the private sector at the health summit in Accra, he said the potential of the private sector was not understood and that there was the need to determine the role the private health sector currently played, diagnose the nature and effectiveness of the interface between the public and private sectors and engage them in policy dialogue with stakeholders.

The summit, under the theme: "From Strategy to Action," will review previous performance, take stock and plan ahead for next year. He said CHeSS, with support from stakeholders such the Ministry of Health (MOH), Ghana Health Service (GHS), Christian Health Association of Ghana (CHAG) the privative Health sector among others launched a workshop in July 2009 to understand the major questions around the role of the private sector.

It was followed by a validation and discussion workshop in Dec 2009 to discuss the findings from the data collected and analyzed it to address the questions formulated at the launch. In March 2010, a decision workshop took place to obtain directions for policy and action coming from the December worksh op and to make specific decisions with concrete implementation plans Dr. Adjei said the workshop took cognizance of additional analysis of existing data: Demographic Health Surveys, Ghana Living Standard Surveys, mapping of 7 districts: 5 urban and 2 rural, 730 public and private actors, patient exit interviews with 1,200 patients, community focus group discussions, In-depth interviews of private actors, interviews of policy makers, regulators, private association leaders among others. He said some of the outcome of the study included the domination of chemical sellers in the provision of care especially rural and deprived urban, urban hospitals having more human resource than rural hospitals, that private health provide access to health services had improved dramatically in the past several years and the private health sector as an important source of care (about 55% of Ghanaians report seeking care from the private health sector)

Also the nearness, customer service, medicines, lab availability, and National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) accreditation were factors attracting consumers to private providers.

On Challenges that providers faced, he said access to financing was the most severe obstacle to growth however the overall policy environment in Ghana was a friendly business and private sector.

This, he said, was so because there had been a specific Private Health Sector Policy since 2003 and many of the identified issues and proposed strategies were still relevant He however noted that NHIA delays in reimbursements were negatively impacting public and private providers.

The study he said among other things recommended a collective voice for the private health sector, review and revision of the 2003 Private Health Sector Policy, strengthen the participation of the private sector in existing coordination mechanism as well as create avenues of access to credit and advisory services for the private health sector and establish a joint task force to address of NHIS- fraud, delays in reimbursement, and slow accreditation.

Dr Adjei called for an enhanced capacity of the private health sector to engage and work with the government to strengthen government's capacity to create the necessary enabling environment to support the private health sector. 30 April 10