The seventh West African Health (WAH) Medical Exhibition and Conference, opened in Accra on Thursday to provide a unique opportunity for public private partnership and business promotion in health care services.

The two-day international event on the theme: “The Emergence of Public Private Partnership as a Panacea for Health Care Development in West Africa”, is being hosted by Ministry of Health (MOH) in collaboration with Global Resources and Projects to create a platform to share experiences on Public Private Partnership (PPP).

The maiden conference brought together experts in medicine and allied fields to figure out ways of fixing the missing links in health systems across the West African Sub-Region.

Mr. Alban Kingsford Sumana Bagbin, Minister of Health, stressed on the importance of mobilising local wealth to provide health for the people, by repackaging services that needed to be out-sourced and ensuring effective ways to market them.

He underscored the importance of PPP in the development and expansion of health infrastructure and services to ensure quality health care.

Mr. Bagbin said Government believed in private sector participation in addressing the raising need of the people, and would provide the enabling environment to ensure their effective participation in service delivery.

He said there was the need for the adoption of a mix of strategies to arrest or reverse the downward trend in the health status of people in the Sub-Region.

Mr. Bagbin said there was the urgent need to promote healthy lifestyles among the citizenry, strengthen diagnostic services, restructure supply chain management systems to ensure quality and more reliable flow of health products, invest in new infrastructure and equipment, health facilities, pharmaceutical, cleaning as well as the supply of basic utility services.

He called on Ministries of Health in West Africa, their agencies and departments, to strengthen their private sector units by building the necessary capacities for the development of real public-private partnerships within the health sector.

Mr. Bagbin asked the private sector to explore opportunities within the health sector for partnerships with development partners, to strengthen research and policy development to create fair, attractive and enabling environments for private sector participation.

Dr. Wale Alabi, Project Chief Executive Officer, Global Projects and Resources and Project Director of WAH, noted that the theme of the conference had become a subject of major discussions among the health care leaders in Africa, and the exhibition would therefore provide the platform of immeasurable value for networking and conducting business.**