HEALTH CARE

The vision of the Upper West Akim Health Directorate is to ensure that diseases and avoidable deaths are kept to the barest minimum and every citizen has access to quality–driven, result–oriented and close –to–client focused and affordable health service by a well-motivated workforce. The Upper West Akim Health Directorate, working under the Ghana Health Service has the mandate to implement approved health sector polices in such a manner as to ensure access to priority health interventions and to manage prudently resources available for provision of health services.

The directorate has a mission to improve the overall health status of all persons living in the District through provision of access to quality health care delivered in a humane, efficient and effective manner by well-trained, friendly and highly motivated and client oriented personnel in collaboration with all stakeholders.

The directorate is focused on ensuring that all children survive beyond 5 years, pregnant women would have safe deliveries with healthy babies and the general population is empowered with knowledge and screened to prevent or treat communicable and non-communicable diseases.

The District has eight (8) sub-districts namely; Abamkrom, Adeiso, Asikasu, Asuokaw, Mepom, Odumkyere-Darmang, Nyanoa and Okurase sub-districts in terms of health service delivery. Below is the district health map.

Health Facilities

The District has both public and private health facilities which offer health care delivery services in the District. The highest level or type of health facility in the entire district is the Health Centre and it is only three (3) in numbers and can be located at Adeiso, Mepom and Odumkyere Darmang.

In the remote or rural areas where accessibility to these health centers is a challenge, the health facility type provided is the CHPS Compound. These CHPS Compounds are inadequate in number since the district has greater number of rural communities. There are currently twenty-eight (28) CHPS zones in the district out of which only seven (7) had permanent physical structures. The table and figure below presents the type and number of health facilities in the district.

Table 8: Types and Number of Health Facilities

From the figure above, it can be seen that the health facilities in the district are grossly inadequate compared to the growth rate of the district population. Also, some of the existing facilities are too are in bad state and needs to be rehabilitated and refurbished.

Types of Health Services

Table 9: Types of Health Services Rendered in Health Center

Incidence of Diseases

Ten causes of Outpatient Morbidity – 2020

The data below shows the trend of occurrences of diseases in the District.  As indicated in the graph, Malaria continues to top the chart as the most reported case at OPD followed by Acute Respiratory Infections. Hypertension, skin diseases & ulcers and anemia could be seen to be on a rise. Poor sanitation could be attributed to the cause of malaria cases in the district

The data presented shows the trend of occurrences of diseases in the District.  As indicated in the table below, Malaria continues to top the table as the most reported case at OPD followed by Acute Respiratory Infections and Anaemia. Diarrhoea, Anaemia, Typhoid fever, Hypertension, skin diseases and rheumatism could be seen to be on a rise. Poor sanitation and inadequate access to improved toilet facilities could be attributed to the cause of malaria and diarrhoea cases respectively.