The district health delivery system is managed by the District Health Management Team (DHMT) which is headed by the District Director of Health Services. Among the services provided by the DHMT are Health Administration, Health Promotion and Curative Services, Maternal and Child Health/Family Planning Services and Disease Control and Preventive Services. The Team is also responsible for the co-ordination of the activities of the various divisions in collaboration with other health related sectors for the promotion of health development and disease prevention.
There are nineteen health facilities in the district. One district hospital, one mission hospital both at Nkwanta and one health centre at Tutukpene. The rest are 4 clinics – two publicly managed – at Brewaniase and Kecheibi and two privately managed – at Pusupu and Obanda and twelve CHPS compounds.
The top five causes of hospital admissions and death in the district are malaria, anaemia, hypertension pregnancy related complications and snake bite. The district is involved in a number of Malaria control programmes including Roll Back Malaria Programme and measures such as environmental cleanliness, netting of doors and windows and the use of impregnated bed nets. But malaria still accounts for over 40% of all OPD attendance.
Many children in the district suffer from malnutrition because they do not receive adequate amounts of nutritious foods. The obvious reasons are that many parents do not pay much attention to their children’s dietary requirements because they are either ignorant, poverty stricken, adhere to traditional beliefs, or have large families that they cannot cater for adequately.
Potable water coverage in the district is just about 75% meaning that about 25% of people living in the district do not have access to safe drinking water. Majority of households use river/stream water as their main source of drinking water, while about 50 percent use bore-hole/pump/tube well.
The District’s Mutual Health Insurance Scheme took off smoothly in the district in February 2006. As at the end of December 2009, over 24,678 had registered. But currently, the total number of clients stands at 102,000. The scheme faces a number of challenges including inadequate logistics making it difficult to reach out to the hard-to-reach communities for education, registration, and photo-taking; inadequate office accommodation resulting in the creation of ‘offices under tree’ for some of the workers; delays in renewal and abuse of healthcare services by clients.