President Akufo-Addo
President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo says the use of drones to supply essential and lifesaving medical supplies to health facilities will not be run at the expense of tax payers.
“This programme is not going to be run on the public budget. Corporate social responsibility contributions from private sector players will pay for the service”
“I prefer drones flying to deliver essential medicines to our people than an investment in guinea fowls that allegedly flew off to Burkina Faso without any trace,” President Akufo-Addo said.
In an encounter with the media in Accra yesterday, President Akufo-Addo said the drone project would be the world’s largest and most advanced medical drone delivery network.
He said there would be four distribution centres from where the drones would be operating, and would stock 148 lifesaving and essential medical supplies, and not only blood.
President Akufo-Addo indicated that the drone delivery service would save lives, decrease wastage in the system, guarantee healthcare access for more than 14 million people nationwide, and employ over 200 Ghanaians.
“In all we do, we want to ensure that health officials are well-trained, reasonably content with their conditions, and are able to practise their profession, so we can all have the confidence to entrust our lives into their hands”.
“The prosperity we seek for our people can only be attained when our people are healthy,” he said.
Additionally, the President expressed the government’s commitment to provide every constituency an ambulance each in the early part of next year.
“This will not solve the ambulance problem immediately, but it certainly shows more commitment to finding a solution than we have ever seen”.
“Lots of things are happening in the health sector, including the fact that this government has paid up the GH¢1.2 billion arrears we inherited, and brought the operations of the NHIS back to life,” he said
On the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), he said with government having paid up the GH¢1.2 billion arrears it inherited from the Mahama government, the scheme had been brought back to life
President Akufo-Addo touched on the Free Senior High School policy and indicated that the insufficient numbers of classrooms, desks, laboratories, computers and dormitories, would soon be addressed by the government.
President noted that with ingenuity and innovation, his administration had, through the Ghana Education Trust Fund, secured a $1.5 billion facility to help develop infrastructure in our schools.
“Parliamentary approval has been obtained, and the first tranche of this facility will be used to build more classroom blocks and dormitories in our schools to give our schools appropriate facilities to meet the demands of the 21st century”.
“And, so, we are on double track, and we are building the classrooms and laboratories, and gradually turning the once deprived schools into well-equipped ones. We find that paying attention to the proper management of schools means we are getting better results,” he said.
BY YAW KYEI
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