New registration policy for herbal practitioners

THE Ministry of health (MoH) has launched a policy guideline on the registration and licensing of traditional health practice to promote professionalism and enhance public confidence in traditional healing.
The guidelines are expected to eliminate the high incidence of quackery, charlatanism and unethical practice such as the sale of herbal medicine on passenger vehicles, as well as unsubstantiated claims and preventable deaths.
Through the enforcement of standards for quality service delivery, the Deputy Minister for Health, Dr Benjamin Kumbour, who launched the guidelines in Accra yesterday, said, he was confident that the guidelines would provide useful basis for service provision under the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS).
The registration exercise, according to him, was instituted by a ministerial directive issued by the MoH to the Traditional Medicine Practice Council (TMPC) Secretariat.
He said the regulatory structures had been established to safeguard public health through the protection of practitioners and the citizenry in furtherance of the ministry’s commitment to integrate traditional medicine into the mainstream health delivery system within the context of public-private partnership.
The government’s efforts were also intended to harness the potential of traditional medicine, which Dr Kumbour said had been described as ‘Green Gold’, as a foreign exchange earner and an effective alternative to Western medicine in healthcare provision.
He said traditional medicine had been abused and continued to be exploited, culminating in health hazards, a situation which he said was not peculiar to Ghana but neighbouring countries as well.
That, he expressed, had attracted not only public condemnation or criticism but also loss of public confidence because currently practitioners were mainly self-styled professionals, with a few having qualifications from institutions outside Ghana.
To that effect, he announced that the ministry had also constituted a nine-member panel to assess and, where appropriate, recommend and approve prospective applicants for accreditation as per the rule and regulations.
The Registrar of the TMPC, Mr Korbla Hlortsi-Akakpo, said it was the hope that with the launch, the TMPC Secretariat would be supported to effectively implement the directive in order not to only sustain the interest of the panel members but also achieve the expected outcome.
He also announced that a legislative instrument was in the offing to ban the sale of herbal drugs in passenger vehicles.
A member of the Ghana Federation of Traditional Medicine (GHAFTRAM), Mr Kenneth Danso, was hopeful that the exercise would help eliminate quack practitioners and reduce the use of Western drugs, most of which were suspected to be counterfeit.