Chief Executive Officer of the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA), Dr Samuel Annor, has said educating government communicators on the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) to equip them to also propagate the works of the NHIS to the public to deepen knowledge and restore public confidence in the scheme, forms part of its policy.
His comment comes on the back of a memo circulating on social media that GHS62,370 of NHIA’s funds, were used to sponsor the training of 65 government communicators in April to help them “formally educate” the public on “NHIS policies and comprehensively explain management’s new proposals to enhance the work of the Scheme”.
The NHIA is currently advocating an increase of the National Health Insurance Levy (NHIL) from 2.5 to 3.5 percent to prevent the scheme from collapsing.
Speaking about the memo on the Executive Breakfast Show (EBS) on Class91.3FM, Dr Annor told show host Moro Awudu that: “In terms of policy, we run an open-door and open-books and let the public know as much as possible about what is going on and to hear from the public as much as possible, because we want to revise and reform the National Health Authority together as a nation, not at just our management level.
“So, we do these things to educate people to help people understand and send the message across, so, if it is that, then it’s something we debated and budgeted for.
“You might think this is too much, we have so many things we want to do, renewal, changing our people from just sitting at the desk, educating people, we have to send this message out loud and clear, we want to reform the whole structure, so, this will go on for the next one year and then once we’ve had the path that we are charting, it might become business as usual but at this point in our transition, we believe it is important that the whole country, everybody is well informed.
“We might be using a small amount to achieve a certain purpose, but at the end, it will save the nation, it will save the national health insurance millions of cedis and it’s the saving of the millions of cedis which is our target.”
Here’s the memo:
