The 22nd plenary session of the West African Health Sector Unions Network (WAHSUN) was on Wednesday opened in Accra to discuss how health unions can mobilise to address health issues in West Africa.
The two-day hybrid session, which is being attended by health sector unions across the subregion, both online and in person, will discuss how climate change, galamsey and mental health affect the health of people and how to avert the situation.
Mr Kwaku Agyeman-Manu, the Minister for Health, who opened the session said Ghana was making conscious efforts to avoid being caught off guard in any future pandemic.
“We are improving the health infrastructure through the construction of 111 district hospitals with the state-of-the-art equipment and we are in the process of establishing a local vaccine manufacturing plant to manufacture vaccine,” he said.
He said Ghana was also actively engaged in cold-chain system enhancement to support the storage of the high volumes of vaccines and scaling up research labs in academia to improve biomedical research in the development of vaccine.
The Minister said amidst all the global and regional health challenges, human activities consistently impacted the planet leading to climate change, and in some cases, causing devastating effects.
“Climate change is already impacting health in many ways, increasing frequent extreme weather events, such as heatwaves, wildfires, storms, and floods disrupting food and water systems leading to illness and even deaths,” he said.
Mr Agyeman-Manu said although Africans may not be directly contributing to climate change, it was their responsibility to speak up and ensure that the world reduced fossil fuel and other factors that contributed to climate change.
Mrs Perpetual Ofori-Ampofo, President of the Ghana Registered Nurses, and Midwives Association and WAHSUN, said the meeting would empower health sector union leaders to adopt best healthcare practices in their countries.
Commenting on mental health care, she said mental health care in Ghana needed a lot of boosting and that the Mental Health Authority needed to be supported to enable the professionals work effectively.
“There is just a thin line between normalcy and mental illness, people need a lot of counselling and support when issues of stress and anxiety occurs, apart from those that are genetic that exists in families most mental health issue arise due to stress and everyday life issues.”
She said Ghana needed to end ‘galamsey’ because it had impacted even the unborn generation and destroying the eco-system.
The plenary session is on the theme: “The correlation between climate change and health, the role of health sector unions”.
