By Rachel Kakraba
The National Malaria Elimination Programme is embarking on a Malaria Death Audit to verify the cause of deaths attributed to malaria.
This has become necessary to inform policies aimed at eliminating malaria.
A medical doctor with the National Malaria Elimination Programme who disclosed this to journalists in Accra, Kofi Adomako, said the frequent association of malaria as a cause of death is an indictment on the programme.
He revealed that so far, an audit carried out revealed that most of the deaths associated with malaria were not malaria-related deaths.
“We will go for logistics, and at the end of the day, it will come out that three thousand people died from malaria. It was like we were not doing anything, so that is why we started with this death audit. The death audit has shown us that most of the deaths that were given to malaria were not actually malaria deaths.
Dr. Adomako also revealed a similar exercise on diagnosis and the cause of admissions. He said attributing malaria to the majority of cases reported at health facilities prevents patients from receiving the needed care.
“Some people are just writing malaria as the diagnosis when the person doesn’t actually have malaria. So, we want to start this one too. If it’s not malaria, don’t report it as malaria because it’s an indictment on us.”
He added, “This is what happened in 2015 when there was a meningitis outbreak. The first set of people that died were all treated for malaria; meanwhile, they had meningitis.”
He said the Programme in collaboration with National Health Insurance Authority and the Health Facility Regulatory Authority, will soon clamp down on health facilities found attributing all causes of death and admissions to malaria without proper scrutiny.
“We believe that it is possible that some facilities may not be treating the people for malaria anyway but are just putting it there as a cause of admission so that the NHIA will pay them more. This is something we are looking into. We are now in close collaboration with the National Health Insurance Authority and the Health Facility Regulatory Authority, HEFRA. If you are found to be doing that, it’s against the regulations.”
Dr. Adomako encouraged the public to embrace all malaria interventions because they are effective.
