Alliance for Reproductive Health Rights (ARHR) has called on the government to ensure adequate availability of medicines and other logistics required for the management of COVID-19 cases at the Primary Health Care level.

The Alliance, in a press statement, said the call was necessitated by the many complaints about the inadequate facilities for testing and diagnosing of coronavirus.

It said some members of the public, who had had recent contacts with the COVID-19 healthcare response systems set up by the government, had complained about the high cost of COVID-19 case management medicines.

The statement said although the complaints and concerns had been in the background for some time, the public was awakened by the accounts of a frontline worker, a biomedical scientist and twice positive patient; Mr. Prosper Senyo Sokpe, during an interview with an Accra based television station on 18th of January 2021.

It said besides the many horrifying details shared by the frontline worker, Mr Sokpe narrated his ordeal in relation to the lack of COVID-19 treatment medicines at a facility where he was admitted and had to fall on family and friends to save his life.

“We join this frontline worker and all other frontline workers in urging Government to ensure that COVID-19 related services are indeed free and accessible to all people,” it said.

The statement said the nation’s seriousness in containing the pandemic must show in the government’s actions, especially, now that at least three Covid-19 variants had spread across about 57 countries in the past few months, with the pandemic getting dire for people and countries.

“It is our fervent hope that the Government of Ghana will work assiduously towards actualising its commitment at the World Health Assembly in May 2020, which resolved unanimously on the importance of “transparent, equitable and timely access to quality, safe and efficacious diagnostics, therapeutics, medicines and vaccines,” the statement said.

It appealed to the government to prioritise investment into improved primary health care in the country to ensure access to health for all people, irrespective of region, district or community or financial ability.