More than 80 per cent of people living with epilepsy in the country are not seeking treatment due to stigma.
Although all the essential medicines required to treat the condition are covered under the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), stigma within the communities where people living with the condition reside is affecting their utilisation of health facilities to access the medications.
A prominent epileptologist and neurologist, Prof. Patrick Adjei, who said this, pointed out that stigma had been one of the main drivers of the high treatment gap of the condition, urging that nobody should stigmatise anybody with epilepsy, nor should the carers also be stigmatised.
“Just as anybody can have hypertension, diabetes or any other condition, epilepsy is a disease that anybody can acquire at any stage of their lifetime. It is another disease of the brain, and nobody should stigmatise anybody with epilepsy.
“It is treatable and curable in some sense. Anybody who has any form of epilepsy should seek treatment or care at the healthcare centres available to them,” he advised.
Prof. Adjei was speaking at a stakeholder meeting on the implementation of the intersectoral global action plan on epilepsy and other neurological disorders in Accra.
The meeting was, therefore, meant, among other things, to share information about the plan on epilepsy and other neurological disorders, discuss its implementation, review the implementation of the EPInA project, and address specific challenges in achieving the targets and indicators of the action plan in Ghana.
Stigma
Prof. Adjei, who was the Project Lead and Programme Investigator of the plan in Ghana, said they found out during the study in Ghana that stigma around the condition was not limited to those who had the condition, but also the carers and that limited people from seeking health care.
To address the problem, he said, as part of the implementation of the project, they intended to work with the Ministry of Health through the Ghana Health Service to do public health education campaigns in the districts and communities aimed at encouraging people to utilise health facilities where medications were available on the NHIS.
On the disease burden in Ghana, he said one per cent of the country’s current population, which was 330,000, was having the condition. This translates to one in every 10 Ghanaians having epilepsy.
He said the Ghana project was able to improve awareness, diagnosis, care and reduce stigma.
Aim of the project
Prof. Charles Newton of EPInA explained that the main aim of the project was to reduce the health burden of epilepsy, improve prevention, clinical diagnosis and the management of epilepsy.
The Director of the Institutional Care Division of the GHS, Dr Lawrence Ofori-Boadu, said quality of care could not be achieved without access to specialists who would take care of clients and that was why the past few years, the service had been proactive in training primary physicians who would support general practitioners to identify early people with neurological conditions so that they could initiate care and refer appropriately.
Source:
www.graphic.com.gh
