The Sunyani Municipal Office of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) has issued 21,364 clients with the Biometric Membership System (BMS) cards within two months of its commencement.

“On the average, the office captures 450 to 600 clients daily if the network stays stable throughout the day, but on a bad day, we do a range of between 90 to 150 registrations”, Mr. Patrick Kuagbenu, District Director of the Scheme, told the Ghana News Agency (GNA) in Sunyani on Monday.

Mr. Kuagbenu explained that the figure was obtained from May 25 to July 25, because to be able to serve all shades of clients, the Office operated a shift system of personnel, whereby one team came at 0500hours to 1300 hours, while the second team also worked from 1230 hours to 1930 hours.

These times afforded government workers, business people, pupils and students to meet them, either before or after the official working hours for their services, he said, and stressed that “we worked from Monday to Saturday, including public holidays”.

Mr. Kuagbenu added that currently the office had six work stations (machines) permanently fixed in the premises, and two mobile machines for outreach programmes to reach areas in the Municipality.

Averagely, a machine could do between 40 and 45 cards daily but they were able to capture between 55 and 60 because of the high desire by the teeming clients to be captured, he noted.

Mr. Kuagbenu commended clients for being orderly, co-operative and responsible, and attributed the situation to their crowd management and control strategy, which had been working according to plan, saying that accounted for the target they had achieved within the period under review.

He announced that pupils under the government’s school feeding and free school uniform distribution programme were registered without cost, on Saturdays, explaining that the day was devoted for their service, so they were conveyed from their locations to the office.

Mr. Kuagbenu concluded that more than 21,000 clients served under the BMS in two months, included 682 special group category, which included both serving and retired personnel of the security services.