Health training institutions lack ICT education

STAKEHOLDERS in the health sector have identified lack of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) education in health training institutions as one of the challenges facing healthcare delivery in the country.
Mr Sam Quarshie of the Ghana Health Service (GHS) lamented the situation at nurses training institutions where student nurses were taught a subject they called “Computer Appreciation” which, he said, was not relevant to the ICT needs of the health sector.
Mr Quarshie made the disclosure at a meeting of stakeholders in Accra at which it was discovered that some doctors were not computer literate, hence their inability to access information on health care on the Internet or interact with other doctors in the developed world on health-related issues.
He told the Daily Graphic that “when a doctor is employed in the health sector, he is put on a particular level and on a particular salary but this is not so for ICT experts, hence their unwillingness to accept positions in the health sector”.
He explained further that “ICT experts in most hospitals are individuals who can only create Power Point presentation, use animation in Word or other software to do presentations”.
He stressed that one’s ability to use Power Point, Word, Excel, among other things, was fundamental in ICT, which everyone in the health sector must know.
For his part, Prof Ofosu-Amaah of the Medical and Dental Council, who chaired the discussions, told the Daily Graphic that health workers could no longer ignore the importance of ICT in healthcare delivery.
“Doctors must share information and ideas on health issues and this can only be made possible with the help of ICT,” he said.
Prof Amaah said the privacy of the patient must be protected, for which reason the current system of keeping information on patients on paper could no longer be allowed to continue.
“We need a comprehensive database on all patients which can be accessed at every level of the delivery process,” he noted.
The Director-General of the Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT, Dorothy K Gordon, said her centre was prepared to partner all players in the health sector to train practitioners in ICT.
She said the role of ICT in healthcare delivery could not be underestimated in the current era of ICT, adding that for the solution, “we need a broad-base policy on ICT for healthcare delivery in the country”.
Contributing to the discussion, Dr Edem Hiadzi of the Lister Hospital said the solution to the problem was to implement an ICT licensing system for health sector workers, without which one could not practice.