The Board Chairman of the Health Facilities Regulatory Agency (HeFRA), Nana Otuo Acheampong, has urged the government to empower the agency with logistics and resources to strengthen it to deliver on its mandate of improving health care in the country.

He informed the Daily Graphic of several challenges confronting the agency which has the sole mandate of regulating the about 30,000 health facilities in the country.

In an interview yesterday in Accra soon after the board of the agency was sworn into office, Nana Acheampong revealed that although he intended to strengthen the agency to enable it to deliver on its important task of ensuring quality health delivery in the country, there were inadequate resources and logistics available to him and his team, which hindered them from delivering on this mandate.

“To be able to monitor the activities of over 30,000 institutions, it is simply inadequate to have a single car at the disposal of the agency,” he stated.

Nana Acheampong stressed that aside from occasional reports of corruption and underhand dealings impeding the work of the agency, its very place of work was too small to accommodate the needed staff to man its operations.

“We have to give policy directions and regulate how these health facilities operate, but our very place of work is too small and we will need a bigger place,” he said.

He, however, indicated that the agency could practically be responsible for managing its financial affairs through internally generated funds from payments for licences and permits but their current state of affairs needed to be improved first.