Director General of the Ghana Health Service, Dr Ebenezer Appiah-Denkyira, has called for the use of bench marks to determine services delivered at health institutions to raise the standard of health delivery in the country.

He said such move could make it possible for health institutions to be classified into groups, depending on the type of services they render.

Dr Appiah-Denkyira said these when the US Ambassador to Ghana, Mr Gene Cretz, and Dr Fazle Khan, Country Director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDCP), inspected laboratories of the Koforidua Regional Hospital as part of the accreditation process of the facilities into an internationally recognized status on Wednesday.

The Eastern Regional Director of Health Services, Dr MacDamien Dedzo, said the improvement of services at the laboratory of the Regional Hospital had inspired authorities at other district laboratories to improve their performances. He pledged the support of the Eastern Regional Directorate of Health Services for the hospital laboratory.

Mr. Cretz said strengthening laboratory and diagnostic capacity was a priority of the U.S. Government, under President Obama’s Presidency Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which aimed at reducing barriers to treatment and improving patients’ care.

Dr Khan said out of the 340 laboratories accredited in Africa by the CDCP, 312 are in South Africa and only two (private ones) are in Ghana.

He appealed to the Ghana Health Service (GHS) to encourage the Regional Directors of Health Service to support the development of laboratories in their regions.

The Director of the Regional Hospital, Dr Kwame Anim Boamah, said after the first external assessment of the Regional Hospital Laboratory, the management of the hospital decided to rehabilitate the laboratory block of the hospital to support the efforts of the department to improve by the next external assessment in February 2013.

He said medical equipment like haematology analysers, chemistry analysers and hormone analysers at the hospital frequently beak down.

Dr Boamah appealed to the GHS and CDCP to provide the hospital with those machines and refrigerated centrifuge to enable it to prepare essential blood products.