To reaffirm his commitment to collaboration, efficiency, and strengthening healthcare systems within the Ghana Health Service (GHS), the Director-General, Prof. Samuel Kaba Akoriyea has been paying surprise visits to the various divisions.
The visits, according to him, aim to connect with staff and gain firsthand information about their work and to also explore ways to enhance service delivery.
Since Prof. Samuel Kaba Akoriyea’s assumption of office as the Director–General, he has so far paid surprise visits to the Finance, Health Administration and Support Services (HASS), Family Health, Internal Audit, Policy Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation (PPME) and Supply Stores and Drugs Management (SSDM) units.
On Friday March 7, his surprise visit was to the Public Health Division of the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital where he interacted with the managers of the Expanded Programme on Immunization, the programme manager for Buruli Ulcer, Leprosy and Yaws and the offices of the Health Promotion unit of GHS.
He told journalists, that the move will continue till the end of the year, entreating all employees of the Service to embrace the principle “charity begins at home”.
He also noted that he wasn’t happy with some of the things he saw.
‘‘You know when you make a surprise visit, this is not the first time since I took over, I have been doing that from time to time both at the headquarters and all places. When you tell people that you are visiting, they put everything so nice when you come, immediately you leave, things go back to normal. But when you do a surprise visit, you get to understand exactly how the place works and what happens is that, you were with me, those that are fixable immediately, I tell them to fix it and I don’t want to come back and meet it again.
But there are some of the things I would have to sit with the people responsible to really look at it because I know they will have some explanations, some of them might not be acceptable, some of them might be acceptable, and then we will have a way of dealing with anything that we have.
But it’s not everything at this particular moment I would like to discuss from my surprise visits because I will meet with the people responsible and then we figure those things out. But this is going to continue and people should always be ready throughout the year’’ he explained.
Meanwhile, some critics of his visits would rather have him go to the lower divisions within the Service, the various health centres and CHPs under the districts who are being poorly managed by the administration staff.
