Free Senior High and Primary School Medical Screening
The Government of Ghana in 2017 launched the School Health Screening for pre-tertiary students across the country with the goal to ensure optimal health, nutrition and wellness of the students and contribute to improved learning outcomes. Since the inception, MPA has been collaborating with the Ghana Health Service and Ghana Education Service to provide health screening for the students.
In response to the President’s directive to the Ghana Health Service (GHS) and the Ghana Education Service (GES) to institutionalise the screening of all new entrants in public second cycle institutions as well as primary school children under the Free Senior High and Primary School Programme, Millennium Promise partnered with the two institutions to implement the free medical screening program.
The goal of the programme is to ensure optimal health, nutrition and wellness of all pre-tertiary students and contribute to improved learning outcomes. The program has helped to diagnose and provided health solutions to freshmen entering senior secondary schools with medical complications. The main activities of the health screening consist of four components: Medical History, Eye examination, Laboratory Investigation and Nutrition.
Data collection and monitoring of the program is vital given the large amount of data being collected every year on each student. In line with the government’s policy of accelerating the shift to paperless systems across national programs, MPA has supported the program with Information and communication technology (ICT) tools to enhance the monitoring of the activities. MPA’s support which includes hardware like laptops, mobile phones and tablets, applications with the capacity to create digital data collection, and software that allows users to upload data to storage facilities in real-time, have been implemented to reduce conventional challenges associated with traditional paper-based data collection. In areas where internet connectivity is a challenge, devices that allow users to collect data without internet connection have been provided so that data are uploaded onto the cloud when field staff move to an area with internet connectivity.