Long way from action plan to results

Martha Gyansa Lutterodt travelled all the way from Ghana to share her experiences.

Uppsala Health Summit got underway in early June, only a week after the World Health Organization’s (WHO) decision-making body voted to establish the first global plan of action to combat resistance to antibiotics.

The conference covered two days, with lectures alternating with discussions in smaller groups. The goal was to devise concrete proposals for dealing with various aspects of antibiotic resistance and to move the WHO action plan forward towards well-defined measures.

Changing behaviours

One of the invited participants was Martha Gyansa Lutterodt, who heads Ghana’s ministry of health’s office for pharmaceuticals issues and is in charge of shaping the country’s pharmaceuticals policy. Among other things, she took part in a panel discussion about how to go about influencing decision-makers and changing behaviours involving the use of antibiotics.

“In Ghana we are currently busy mapping how medical staff prescribe antibiotics and what knowledge they have of antibiotic resistance in civil society. One of the greatest problems in Ghana is that drugs are being used in the wrong way. To be able to devise suitable courses of action and the implement them we first need to know what the current situation looks like,” she maintains.

Need for education

Efforts to map medical and pharmacy personnel’s knowledge have helped to identify where resources need to be deployed. It turned out, for example, that antibiotics were often prescribed without any thorough diagnosis having been determined, which indicates the need for education, diagnostic methods and enhanced resources for taking samples. Part of the work has involved the development of manuals and courses that will now be tested in some regions of the country.

“We have also initiated our policy work. The findings have been discussed at our annual meetings regarding health issues, where we review our work and decide what our guiding principles will be for the coming years.”

Discussions with the parliament

The next step in the process is now to take up discussions with the parliament in order to accomplish policy changes. Martha Gyansa Lutterodt stresses that it is important that each country shape its health and medical policy based on its own situation.  

“What works in Sweden or in other countries cannot be directly translated to Ghana, for instance. To create long-term change that works, measures need to be devised and implemented in their context.”

She also reiterates the importance of working systematically and mapping the situation in order to be able to take appropriate measures and create a stable health and medical system from the base up.

“If you can measure things, you can also change them. For instance, we need information about what the consumption of antibiotics really looks like. This is not available in Africa, but it will be needed if we are to be able to deal with this issue.”

Easy steps forward

Another key premise involves financial resources.

“Training medical staff is expensive. Here we have received major assistance from, among others, the ReAct network through SIDA, but we still have a long way to go.”

The challenges Ghana faces are numerous, but Martha Gyansa Lutterodt nevertheless feels that there are examples of steps forward that are relatively easy to take.

“There is a lot of low-hanging fruit. For example, I believe that with rather limited resources we can improve the prescribing of antibiotics at the national level in the short to medium term. When it comes to implementing WHO’s global action plan, we will no doubt need a little more time.”

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Uppsala Health Summit is a recurring international policy arena for dialogue on challenges for health and healthcare, and how we can overcome them. The last meeting ”A world without antibiotics” took place 2-3 June 2015.