Former Director General of Ghana Health Service, Professor Agyeman Badu Akosah says physical inactivity has been the bane of non-communicable diseases explosion in the country.
He said physical inactivity is at the root cause of the surge in cases of hypertension and diabetes.
The Former Director General of the Ghana health service made this known in an interview with Citi news on the side lines of the 4th congregation for the conferment of Master of Public Health Degree on some 20 graduands at the Ensign College of Public Health at Kpong in the Eastern region.
According to him, “we are producing public health graduates each year but the numbers are insignificant and one area that I feel we are not making progress is in the area of what I call physical inactivity. Physical inactivity is really the bane of the non-communicable diseases explosssion; if you take hypertension and diabetes.”
He said ” I will in the coming months embark on a project with Ensign College of Public Health and all the community health departments in the country to begin to involve the community in finding ways of diminishing physical inactivity.
Professor Akosah added that ” one of the things I have noticed in a surgery is that on 13 percent of children from 6 to 17 year old, do not do significant amount of exercise everyday and this is worrying” he said
Professor Agyeman Badu Akosah, who is the Vice Board Chair of Ensign College of Public Health, says there is the need for more public health physicians to address the public health crisis in the country.
According to him, government as well as corporate Ghana must play diverse roles in increasing the number of public health practitioners in schools.
The founder and board Chair of Ensign College of Public Health, Dr Lynette Gay admonished graduands of the 2019 year group of the school to be changemakers.
Dr Gay called on government to provide the needed funds and facilities for healthcare practitioners to enable them function appropriately.
The best graduating student, Kenneth Missah, in his view said ” public health is part of medical programme that really need to go across because it deals with preventive measures, so government need to encourage more public health professionals into the system. This can help reduce the eminence of high incidents of disease conditions in the country.”
