A system is made up of various aspects of an organization working harmoniously together to bring a particular function. For a fictional health care system, we need to analyse the human resource, health financing, medicine and technology, leadership and governance, monitoring and evaluation indicators to measure the progress of health delivery, setting of target, and effective and efficient management of diseases. The public health sector has to also function effectively in order to prevent and disease and promote health. The most important questions to ask about the health care delivery system in Ghana are:
1 Do we have the requisite human resource based on service delivery?
Do we have adequate medical equipment and gadget to manage diseases and emergencies when they occur?
Do we have effective management and leadership that is in tandem with corporate governance and public administration?
Do we have monitoring and evaluation framework upon which hospital reviews are done?
Do stakeholders take an interest in the management of public health facilities in Ghana?
Do we all as Ghanaians care to know how our doctors, nurses and paramedics are trained, and whether or not there is an ongoing capacity-building programme matching the current needs of clients?
How is the commitment of central government to making sure health facilities are meeting the standard of modern day health care, resourcing health facilities?
Should a health care manager be a clinician? Is it possible for the clinician to leave his or her clinical duties and be engaged in administrative work? Have we been honest in analysing and reviewing how we manage our facilities?
Whose duty it is to make sure that the right things are done?
When our leaders do not develop and build good health system and they are sick, do you expect them to come to such facilities?
Doctors, Nurses, Midwives, Pharmacists and other paramedics become clinicians because they are interested in healing and restoring body function of their clients. So promoting clinicians into management and leadership roles needs to balance the hands- on practice of medicine with the demands of leadership and management. How can leadership and management consultants successfully transition clinicians into managers? Identifying the leadership potentiality of clinicians, scaling out training programmes, coupled with the readiness of the clinicians to embrace the challenge of leadership and management is key to transforming the health sector with robust approach aimed at increasing client's satisfaction. What are employees expecting and looking for in clinician leaders? What employees look for in clinician leaders will be the target and indicators against which leaders will be measured. What do clinicians need to make the leadership leap?
To understand the current shortage crisis of a nurse leader, consider a typical job description for a patient care manager; like the one shown in the graphic below:
This job description provides valuable clues as to the root cause of the constricted pipeline. The typical nursing leader has 40 or more direct reports along responsibility for driving quality patient outcome and efficiency. As if this was not tough enough, many of these leaders enter the job with little to no leadership experience. These jobs place rookie leaders into a role defined by a huge span of control, tremendous responsibility, and need to step back into a non- leadership role whenever staff shortages crop up. It should come as a no surprise, then, that many health facilities are having hard time convincing nurses to become leaders.
Most people who get meningitis survive, often without any after effects, but sometimes these diseases cause a range of disabilities and problems that can alter people's lives. After effects may be temporary or permanent, physical or emotional. People respond to their own situations differently, but frequently are unsure of what to expect after meningitis.
Relatives and friends may also feel the need for information, because the person who is recovering often needs a great deal of support. Getting over meningitis can make major demands on people. Fortunately, many problems improve and disappear over time.
Pneumococcal Meningitis is preventable. Pneumococcal Meningitis is an infection caused by the inflammation of the protective membranes covering the brain and spinal cord known as the meninges. The disease is neither a curse nor hereditary; anyone can get it Symptoms of Pneumococcal Meningitis usually come rapidly. An infected person may develop chest pains, chills, confusion, cough, headache, high fever, rapid breathing, vomiting and even stiff neck.
A struggling addict or alcoholic might ask: “How do I live without drugs and alcohol?” The proposition can be mind-boggling for someone who is still caught in the grip of addiction. Typically, the addict or alcoholic cannot even picture their life and what it would be like without self-medicating with drugs and alcohol. Furthermore, even if they could imagine such a life without chemicals, most of us do not want such a fairy tale existence. The idea of sobriety repels us, because we imagine that we will be miserable without our drug of choice.
Those who stood at this very jumping-off point: baffled by how they had become so dependent and miserable using drugs, but unable to picture a positive life for the future. So how do we strip away the drugs and alcohol, how can we manage a life with this apparent “emptiness” that is sobriety?
First of all, that emptiness that is so dreaded by the newcomer is nothing but a huge mountain of fear. It is only by walking through this fear and giving your new life in recovery a chance that you can begin to understand how that “emptiness” without drugs and alcohol was nothing more than an illusion, and anyone who stays the course in recovery will reap the rewards of a rich and full life. Understand, however, that you probably cannot convince a struggling addict or alcoholic of this. They must accept it on blind faith that their life will get better.
They say that recovery is an action program. This is absolutely the truth. You can see evidence that any recovery must be an action-based program when you start looking at the success stories and comparing them to the countless people who tend to relapse over and over again. Living without drugs and alcohol requires action on a daily basis, and that means discipline. Why discipline? Because the actions that carry you through each day sober have to be repeated, over and over again. That means you need to find and carefully evaluate what works for you in maintaining sobriety.
Each program of recovery, regardless of who is working the program or what steps they are following or what book they are reading, is subjective. Any program of recovery must be first interpreted by an individual and then implemented in that person’s daily life in order to be effective. In the beginning, we have to be told what to do, and how to stay clean. The point to illustrate that recovery programs are truly subjective.
So back to the question: How do I live without drugs and alcohol?” “Take what you need and leave the rest.” This is to be taken literally as sound advice. You have to find your own path in recovery. No one can show you the exact way, because so much of the journey is about introspection and finding out who you are and who you are supposed to be becoming (i.e. what God’s real work for you is). Yes, you are on a journey, and you’re going to have to navigate at least some of it on your own. Others can help you with much of it, but in the end, you will find your own path. Everyone eventually finds their own path–this means that they can look back at their recovery “program” and say “yes, I can see now how I tailored these ideas to fit in to my life. And it worked for me!” Good luck to everyone out there who is working a program of recovery. Don’t be afraid to find your own path. If you know of someone who is seeking the path, please share this with them.