Aaron Motsoaledi condemned “health tourism” while speaking in Zimbabwe.

President Robert Mugabe, who frequently receives treatment in Singapore, had left the meeting of health ministers when Dr Motsoaledi made the comments.

Mr Mugabe’s spokesman has said that the president’s doctor “is not only Zimbabwean, he is actually black… He is very, very, very black”.

George Charamba made those comments to Zimbabwe’s state-run Herald newspaper in May, insisting that President Mugabe was not turning his back on Zimbabwean medical help.

Nigeria’s Muhammadu Buhari and Angola’s José Eduardo dos Santos have also been criticised for seeking medical treatment abroad this year.

At this week’s conference Dr Motsoaledi said:

“We are the only continent that has its leaders seeking medical services outside the continent, outside our territory. We must be ashamed of that.”

“This is called health tourism. We must promote our own,” he added.

Dr Motsoaledi also urged governments to increase funding to local facilities.

He has been praised by South Africans for using public hospitals instead of private facilities.

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Source: BBC

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Speaking on the Citi Breakfast Show, the Health Minister, Kwaku Agyemang-Manu, noted that a test of this new resolve to ensure accountability will be the Ministry’s ability to find some resolution to the Ghana’s Central Medical Store fire in 2015, where over GHc 200 million worth of drugs and medical equipment were destroyed.

[contextly_sidebar id=”cNCTqgs3pT0x1ab5vgvOywHdJekZMvpL”]A year after the Central Medical Store was razed to the ground by fire, a report on the incident confirmed the incident to be an act of arson.

Mr. Agyeman-Manu, a former chairman of the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament, however, assured that there will be a forensic audit into the fire.

He even revealed that some donor partners have been putting pressure on the government and are “threatening to withdraw some of the donations they give to us until some issues have been resolved.”

The US Ambassador to Ghana, Robert Jackson, has already publicly questioned the lack of action or prosecution on the matter of the arson.

He insisted the arson could not be swept under the carpet because the warehouse had about $7 million worth of items donated by American taxpayers.

Without any specific references, Mr. Agyeman-Manu said some of these donor partners “are pushing me to implement the report. They are talking about a forensic audit that should be done and that is what I am pushing myself to do.”

Aside from the forensic audit into the arson, the Health Ministry will also create a special desk to monitor “resource mobilisation and is monitoring deliverables in the sector,” the Health Minister said.

Investment into Health Tourism

Mr. Agyeman-Manu also revealed government’s intent to invest heavily in the creation of a health tourism hub to attract people within the sub-region to receive medical attention in Ghana.

“In the medium to long term, we are looking into investing in the health sector to bring up something like a health tourism hub in west Africa and I am looking at some arrangement to try to use the two big facilities we have now; the University of Ghana Medical Centre and the Ridge Hospital, to attract people who are leaving our country and West African sub-region to far away India and Turkey to do surgeries and things like that,” he explained.

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By: Delali Adogla-Bessa/citifmonline.com/Ghana

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