Accra, April 06 GNA- The Greater Accra Regional Hospital (GARH) Ridge, on Tuesday opened a comprehensive wellness clinic to make preventive healthcare services available to the public.
Preventive healthcare is a routine health service that includes screenings, check-ups, and patient counselling to prevent illnesses, diseases or other health problems.
The clinic will focus on the provision of adult and geriatric, adolescent, and child nutrition wellness services.
It is expected to promote positive health habits and reduce the high incidence of hypertension, diabetes, obesity and its complications and morbidities.
Dr Patrick Kuma Aboagye, Director General of the Ghana Health Service (GHS), who launched the clinic in Accra, said the facility would help check the rise in Non-Communicable Diseases and obesity in children and adults.
He said the centre would increase access to early detection and medical screening of diseases to reduce the cost of medical care.
Dr Emmanuel Srofenye, Medical Director of the Ridge Hospital said the clinic would remove bottlenecks and make primary healthcare affordable and accessible to all.
“A visit to our emergency department clearly showed the changing patterns of morbidity, lifestyle diseases have become the leading causes of admissions in the emergency department,”
He said the early detection of lifestyle diseases would go a long way to improve the health conditions of the public.
Dr Srofenyo said though the GARH was a specialist referral centre, all the wellness programmes and family medicine services were walk-in services without referrals.
Dr Victor Winbe Abugri, a Family Physician Specialist at the GARH, said the centre would empower patients and their families with the information needed to practise healthy habits on daily basis to attain better physical and mental health outcomes.
He said the clinic would offer services such as health screening, annual medical checkups, lifestyle modification, premarital health, pre-employment medical, post-employment medical, and travel medical examination.
“We teach our clients to practice healthy behaviours such as exercising regularly by walking briskly for 30 minutes five times a week, healthy diet counselling, abstaining from harmful habits such as drug use and alcohol, learning about and identifying symptoms of disease among others,” he said.
Dr Abugri said consistently, Hypertension, Diabetes and Cholesterol related problems had been part of the common diseases seen at the Ridge Family Medicine Department and called for a paradigm shift from a healthcare system that was focused primarily on curative care to promoting wellness.
“Collectively, as health care workers, administrators, press, families and individuals, we must adopt, practice and teach healthy habits on daily basis to attain better physical and mental health outcomes,” he said.
GNA