Licensing of traditional, complementary and integrative medicine practitioners to be digitalised

The Traditional Medicine Practice Council (TMPC) has announced plans to digitalize the licensing process for traditional, complementary, and integrative medicine practitioners as part of a strategic revamp of the sector.When implemented, practitioners would be granted unique personal identification numbers (PINs) to facilitate assessment of their status by field registration assistants.These were outlined by Dr. Michael Kyeremateng, the new Registrar and Chief Executive Officer of the TMPC, when he shared his vision statement at an inaugural meeting with staff of the Council, a news brief shared with the Ghana News Agency indicated.At the meeting, Dr. Kyeremateng said it was important to revamp the operations of the Council to become attractive and respond to modern challenges and opportunities in the sector.'To ensure the efficiency of registration assistants who are mostly working on the field, these cadre of staff would be equipped with tablets to enable them check practitioners' eligibility to ope rate on their routine inspections.'This will curb the situation where staff would call the head office to ascertain a practitioner's status which in some cases creates delays assessing information to enhance their efforts at ensuring that all practitioners are licensed and their premises certified,' he said.Among the challenges raised by some staff of the TMPC at the meeting were the lack of logistics, office spaces, furniture, equipment, inadequate allowances and salaries for contract staff, and the absence of a corporate identity.Dr Kyeremateng assured the staff of the Council that his administration would work to improve the brand identity of the TPMC and seek strategic partnerships to improve the conditions of staff.He announced plans by an international collaborative agency, the Edenic Management Consulting Group, based in the United States of America, to collaborate with the Council to train staff and practitioners.The initiative, Dr. Kyeremanteng said, would help to improve the skills sets of the beneficiaries to provide standard primary healthcare delivery and contribute to achieving good health and wellbeing under the Sustainable Development Goals.'I see the Council as an excavator which does not speed but with each staff member diligently going about their various tasks as mandated by the TMP Act, 2000 (Act 575), this excavator will speed to its destination quickly to achieve its aim,' he said.Dr. Kyeremateng mentioned committees he had already constituted to tackle all the key areas of operations of the Council, including the corporate and public affairs committee, the international and external affairs committee, and the Information Technology Committee.Other essential compositions, he added, was the establishment of the National Enforcement, Inspectorate and Task Force Team and more than 4000 Community Protection Assistants of the Ghana Police Service who would be working in each district as taskforce and inspectorate officers.The inspectorate officers would be engaged in every distr ict in Ghana to collaborate with the district officers of the TMPC in their enforcement exercises, he added.Source: Ghana News Agency