research and development division ghana health service

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Ghana Health Service to introduce research policy document

By Godfred A. Polkuu

Navrongo (U/E), Feb. 21, GNA – The Director of Research and Development Division, Ghana Health Service (GHS), Dr Abraham Oduro, says the Service will soon introduce a policy document to streamline research works across the three health research centres in Ghana.

The research centres at Navrongo, Kintampo and Dodowa, under the Division, started as one-man projects, without any policy document, he said.

“Navrongo for instance started with vitamin ‘A’ trial, and then out of that, the Centre was birthed.”

Dr Oduro said the Centres undertook different forms of research without a policy document to guide them on priority areas and what should be done with their findings.

Without a policy document to decide the area of research for health policy development, the work of researchers in the Service would not be beneficial to the populace, he said.

Dr Oduro was speaking at the 2024 annual scientific review meeting of the Navrongo Health Research Centre (NHRC) in the Kassena-Nankana Municipality of the Upper East Region.

The meeting, held on the theme: “Exploring the synergies between health research and academia for development and excellence in tertiary education,” brought together research scientists and officials in academia to deliberate on the theme.

He said with the support of the Director-General of the GHS, Dr Patrick Kuma-Aboagye, the three research centres and the Policy Planning Department, a policy document was drafted in 2023.

“We have the draft already, what we are basically doing now is to refine it. So we are hoping that by the close of this year, we would have come up with a document,” he said.

“For every institution, there is the need to have documents that detail what you are doing.”

Even though there was a Research Division at the GHS, to ensure that the work was well governed, there was the need for a policy to guide researchers on more relevant areas to conduct their studies.

“There must be a policy on the kind of research, capacity development, a document that details the kind of people we need for research, and there must be a policy to be able to tell us which areas are priority to the GHS,” he said.

“I think in modern times, we cannot just be working without a policy document. It is important that there is a policy document that directs new comers and those of us already in the system.”

Dr Patrick Odum Ansah, the Director of the Navrongo Health Research Centre (NHRC), said the review meeting offered the scientists and researchers the opportunity to showcase their work in the period under review.

The Centre, for the past 30 years, had been useful in the Kassena-Nankana Municipality and beyond, adding “We have taken up many of the serious health issues that plague the population.”

He said the Centre did not only concern itself with research for global health alone, but also focused on issues including diarrhoea, meningitis, pneumonia common among the populace.

“We have gotten involved in the development of interventions like vaccines, and those vaccines have brought the diseases down, right in the communities before it spreads,” Dr Ansah said.

He said the NHRC, as part of its work, evaluated government’s Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty programme to know if it achieved results.

“They could not tell until we looked at it, and from our findings, it is a good programme, and has reduced violence in homes.”

“So it is not only biological health, but we look into mental health, social health, and that makes us more relevant in the region.”

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Policy to guide research in Ghana in the offing

26th feb 2024    |     source: graphic online.

Dr Abraham Rexford Oduro, Director of the Research and Development Division (RDD) of the Ghana Health Service (GHS)

The Research and Development Division (RDD) of the Ghana Health Service (GHS) has developed a draft policy to guide health research works across the country.

The policy was developed with the assistance of all three health research centres in the country, namely the Navrongo, Kintampo and Dodowa Health Research Centres, including their development partners.

This is to resolve the recent situation where Ghana did not have any policy to guide its health research centres on the type of research activities it should undertake.

The Director of the RDD of the GHS, Dr Abraham Rexford Oduro, who disclosed this, said the absence of a policy had created spaces for some researchers to conduct just any research without necessarily looking at their impact on the population or the country.

“There is no document that details all that we have been doing.

So, there is the need to document whatever we are doing and that itself will streamline our processes and will make us more efficient,” he stated. 

In an interview with the Daily Graphic on the sidelines of a two-day scientific review by the Navrongo Health Research Centre in the Upper East Region, Dr Oduro said due to the absence of a research policy, some health researchers only conducted research to get promotion or be recruited as university lecturers or to have their names in academic journals, as such the researches brought no direct benefit to the country’s health needs.

The NHRC is one of the three research centres under the Research and Development Division (RDD) of the Ghana Health Service (GHS), established in 1992 to conduct research into major national and international health problems to inform policy for the improvement of health. 

Coordination

Dr Oduro, therefore, stated that the development of the new research policy started in 2023 and that the draft was ready and was going through its final stages, indicating that with all things being equal, the new health research policy would be ready for use by the close of 2024. 

The new policy, the RDD Director explained, would set the priority areas for the various research centres across the country to follow in conducting their research, noting that “in modern times, you cannot just be working without a policy.”

“You know, different people are doing different types of research.

 So, if there is no policy to decide which area we should research to feed into policy development; proper health policy development, then it means that most of the work we are doing may not necessarily be relevant or will not bring benefits to the general population,” he explained.

He said the RDD would ensure that all health research work in the Ghana Health Service “are governed,” pointing out that, it would help to focus attention on areas that would advance the country’s healthcare sector.

Dr Oduro further indicated that the policy would ensure the protection of the participants recruited for the various health research, and also determine whether the research was necessary for the advancement of healthcare delivery in the country.

He added that even though currently there was no research policy to guide the work of the health research centres, they were operating within their mandate and had contributed positively to the development of the country’s healthcare sector.

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