The Navrongo Health Research Centre (NHRC) in the Kasena-Nankana Municipality of the Upper East Region has revealed that unstable power supply is one of the major challenges affecting its smooth operations.

Apart from making it impossible to carry out important tasks whenever the power fluctuates, the situation has also led to the Centre losing some of its important and expensive laboratory and office equipment.

This, according to authorities, has compelled the Centre to spend lots of money in replacing them and procuring automatic voltage regulators and other relevant gadgets to manage the situation.

The Director of the centre, Dr. Abraham Oduro, who made this disclosure in an interview with journalists at Navrongo last week Thursday when the Centre sat for its Annual General and Scientific Review Meeting said the Centre was hard hit last year, adding the situation has improved.

The Annual General and Scientific Review Meeting was on the theme; “Shaping Health Policies in Ghana Through Quality Health Research; The Story of NHRC, Three Decades On.”

“One but not the least challenge that the centre is also facing is power fluctuation. Last year, we spent a lot of money for the purchasing of automatic voltage regulators and even had to go and buy our own transformer to manage the situation.

Power supply in the Navrongo area seems to be very bad. As you may know, we are using huge and fragile equipment in our labs and offices and when power fluctuates, some of them get blown (damaged) and they are quite expensive machines. But the situation has improved a little this year”. He complained.

The Director also mentioned that the Centre is facing a challenge with core funding.

According to him, getting funds to take care of the core spendings of the Centre, which are not usually absorbed by projects, is not easy and that has put much burden on the already meagre resources of the Centre.

Dr. Oduro disclosed that the Centre plans to create an endowment fund and pull together some savings as interim measures to address the challenge while they wait for more support from government and other host institutions.

He said: “Another major challenge, which some of them are being addressed, is core funding. The core expenditure is normally not taken care of by projects.

The core expenditure is supposed to be taken up by the host institution such as the government. Government is doing very well but not enough and like I said we are trying to address it with an endowment fund or we can do savings.

That is to save money that will be able to address our core expenditure”.

Touching on the low staff number at the centre, Dr. Oduro said government has done a great job with the absorption of its staff which for a long time was not given attention.

He said government has absorbed about 10 staff at both national and regional levels into its pay structure.

While asking for government to do more to strengthen the staff population, Dr. Oduro also commended the Upper East Regional Directorate of Health Service for posting some additional workers to the Centre to tackle the issue of staff inadequacy.

Dr. Oduro used the opportunity to advise staff who go for further studies to pursue courses that are relevant to the Centre and the Ghana Health Service to broaden their chances of getting absorbed unto the government pay structure whenever there is the chance.

“The Ghana Health Service has its own kind of staff that they employ. They employ nurses, doctors, biomedical science pharmacists, administrators, accounts staff etc. so if you are working here and you one day want to be absorbed, it is important that you undertake courses that are relevant to the service so that you can be absorbed”. he advised the staff.