Health workers in the Greater Accra Region are undergoing intensive refresher training in disease infection.
The Greater Accra Regional Health Directorate explained that the intent is to reduce the COVID-19 infection rate among health workers in the region.
A year after Ghana’s first COVID-19 case was reported, over seven hundred health workers have been infected with the virus with four deaths.
The Greater Accra Regional Health Director, Dr. Charity Sarpong says enough PPE has also been distributed.
“The sector has done a lot to ensure the safety of the health worker. There is constant refresher training on infection prevention and control practices.”
“It is already part of the training of health workers, but then we are constantly also ensuring that we are doing refresher training, and they strictly adhere to these pieces of training offered to them and then also ensuring the provision of adequate PPE so that they are protected.”
The region has also vaccinated over 87 percent of its targeted population within the first phase of the vaccination exercise.
“We have vaccinated about 87% percent of our targeted population for the first phase. We over and over talked about whom the targeted population is and for them, we have vaccinated about 87% of them for the first phase. This is working out to be about 261,389 persons.”
Already a number of health workers have contracted the COVID-19 disease.
According to the Ghana Health Service (GHS), a total of 3,580 health workers across the country were earlier infected.
Dr. Kuma-Aboagye, the Director-General of the GHS who disclosed this said, “As of the 1st of January, we have recorded 55,220 cases, and we have done about 74,000 tests which translate into 21,512 tests per million population. The positivity rate is about 8.2 percent. Unfortunately, we have recorded 3,658 health workers who have been affected and currently as of today, the number of active cases is 879.”
“Majority of the cases, which is about 52 percent are all in Accra. Currently, all 16 regions in 243 districts have reported cases leaving about 17 districts that are yet to report cases since the outbreak of the pandemic.”