President John Dramani Mahama has appointed a former Upper East Regional Director of Health, Dr. Koku Awoonor-Williams, as a technical advisor to the Minister of Health, Kwabena Mintah Akandoh, at the Ministry of Health (MoH).
As technical advisor, he is expected to provide expert knowledge, strategic guidance and policy recommendations to the ministry on how best to solve problems or challenges in that sector.
Dr. Awoonor-Williams was in charge of the Policy, Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation Division (PPMED) at the national headquarters of the Ghana Health Service (GHS) until his retirement in August, 2020.
After retiring from the service, he became a consultant to the World Health Organisation (WHO) both in Ghana and later in South Africa.
His latest appointment is bound to enliven many Ghanaians, particularly the residents of the Upper East region where he was, and has remained, a symbol of administrative excellence, reliability, generosity, commitment, strength of mind and innovativeness.
Dr. Awoonor-Williams’s legacy in Upper East
While he was the regional director of health in Upper East between 2007 and 2015, Dr. Awoonor-Williams personally proposed and executed several important projects.
Soon after he took over the region, he renovated residential quarters for nurses, midwives and doctors and offered personal incentives to health professionals to accept posting to the forsaken corners of the region.
He renovated a 3-storey office block of the Upper East Regional Health Directorate and assisted many staff to acquire their own vehicles under the Ministry of Health’s “Staff Vehicle Hire Purchase Scheme”. That assistance was also to motivate more staff to accept posting to the hard-to-reach communities in the region.
Before Dr. Awoonor-Williams arrived in the region, the regional health directorate did not have a conference room large enough to hold big indoor events. The directorate always held all big events at rented venues in the capital, Bolgatanga.
While in office, he constructed a 2-storey in-service training centre for the directorate in Bolgatanga with conference rooms suitable for indoor events. He also made the facility child-friendly by attaching a childcare centre to it so that, while nursing mothers are busy at workshops and meetings inside the conference rooms, their children also are gainfully and safely engaged at the childcare centre.
Today, the centre is saving the GHS the costs of renting conference rooms outside and it is generating revenue internally for the service as people and organisations hire it for events.
Other exploits
To bridge the ambulance gap that had existed for several decades in the region, Dr. Awoonor-Williams introduced motorized tri-cycle ambulances in the region’s hard-to-reach areas.
He also established a satellite campus for Degree in Public Health Nursing Programme at Navrongo for healthcare personnel who hitherto were travelling miles to the Northern and other regions in pursuit of professional development.
Until Dr. Awoonor-Williams arrived in 2007, the region had no suitable building for storing vaccines. For years, the condition of the structure where vaccines were kept was a threat to their potency. In 2010, he built an ultramodern walk-in cold room in the capital for storage of vaccines for the region. He also introduced the Mobile Technology for Community Health (MoTeCH) Initiative to help the region and Ghana attain the United Nations’ goals on infant and maternal health.
He introduced the Ghana Essential Health Intervention Project (GEHIP) in the region through a proposal he wrote to the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation (DDCF) to help address maternal deaths and infant morbidity and mortality. The project started off in three districts as a pilot initiative. Subsequently, he penned another proposal that won a $9 million funding from the Korean International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) to scale up GEHIP in the region into what is known today as the CHPS+ Project.
Regional hospital project, construction of more CHPS compounds
The expansion of the Upper East Regional Hospital in Bolgatanga was Dr. Awoonor-Williams’s inspiration, and he continued to facilitate the project until he left the region with the expansion still in progress.
He acquired a van for delivery of medicines and other non-consumables to health facilities across the region and established a laboratory at the Regional Medical Stores at Zuarungu, the capital of the Bolgatanga East District, for the preparation of mixtures and syrups.
Similarly, he facilitated the construction of several Community-based Health Planning Services (CHPS) compounds in the Builsa North, Builsa South District, Kassena-Nankana, Kassena-Nankana West, Bawku, Binduri, Bolgatanga and Bongo municipal and Districts.
He also undertook important research work that informed and shaped some national policies as well as staff development and capacity building programmes during his eight-year administration in the region.
During that period, he vigorously pursued the posting of several doctors to the region. Hitherto, the region was plagued by an acute shortage of medical doctors. The doctor-patient ratio was extremely low as several doctors preferred the more developed southern part of the country to its deprived north.
Extra support services to hospitals
Even while serving as the regional director of health, Dr. Awoonor-Williams was also providing surgical services and clinical consultations at the Upper East Regional Hospital, the Navrongo War Memorial Hospital and the Bongo District Hospital to help lessen the workload on the few doctors in the region.
He earned some wages for the extra work he did at those hospitals but he voluntarily put the earnings back into the directorate’s purse to support the growth of some of the health training institutions in the region. Dr. Awoonor-Williams attached undivided importance to every staff member because he knew that their individual roles, regardless of their backgrounds or academic qualifications, were part of the steps that went into providing the quality health services the people needed. He demonstrated his commitment to the welfare of lowly people, who are mostly ignored by their superiors, by also providing a fully furnished office block and a restroom for drivers at the regional health directorate.
Outside the health service’s territory, he also supported poor widows and orphans and gave scholarship assistance to many second-cycle and tertiary students in the region while he was in charge as a regional director.
He supported underprivileged patients financially and assisted several sick persons to receive tertiary care out of the region. He also offered continuous support to the Ghana Red Cross Society, the Red Cross Mothers, the Ghana Coalition of NGOs in Health and several other local GHS partners to promote health in rural communities.
In 2021, the GHS renamed the in-service centre he built in the region “John Koku Awoonor-Williams In-service Training and Conference Centre.” The facility was initially known as the “GHS In-service Training and Conference Centre.”
Source: Edward Adeti/Media Without Borders/mwbonline.org/Ghana
