Vision:
To have a well-trained, and well-equipped health and social care facilities accessible, and affordable to everyone in the Gambia, with a view to increasing life expectancy of Gambians.
Mission:
To increase access to health care and establish social care facilities by building a major hospital in each region with feeder clinics to cater for the health and social care needs of each region. Furthermore, the GDC will ensure that the quality of Health Care and Social Care in The Gambia is on par and above the neighbouring countries to enable competition for health treatment and allows Gambians to receive all treatments at home rather than abroad.
Policies:
GDC will enact the following policies to attain our vision and mission
- Develop the health care sector and maintain patients’ contributions of a small fee at the point of delivery (fee-for-service) to generate additional funding for the sector to ensure quality health service.
- Establish a new sub-sector within the Health Sector of The Gambia to uphold the rights of people with all forms of disabilities, by legislating an Act through the national assembly to create an essential service that the whole Gambia shall be proud. This service shall be The Health and Social Services Sector, a government lead service that comprises of social workers and other health professionals within the health sector.
- Initiate a Public Private Partnership enterprise where possible to accelerate the development of the Health Sector.
Programmes:
- Free medical care for children, elderly and pregnant women.
- To Build a major hospital in each region with a network of referral health centres. The major hospitals will be fully equipped with resources, including a fully functional radiological services and operating theatres.
- National electronic/digital medical record services which shall be accessible by service providers nationwide. This will save time, lives, and resources especially for our patient referral services. It can also help treat conditions associated with health problems rather than the issue that took a patient to a facility.
- Increase capacity of national pharmaceutical services and the medicines control agency by upgrading the national public health laboratory at Kotu with drugs and medicinal products analysis equipment and personnel. This will help curb the proliferation of substandard/underdosed medicines which are causing hundreds, if not thousands of deaths in our country and increasing the rate of multi drug resistant (MDR) organisms and diseases.
- To build a specialty hospital to care for people with medical conditions that currently require overseas treatment. After 50 years of nationhood, we still travel overseas for oncology care (cancer treatment), heart surgery, pacemaker placement, organ transplant (liver and kidney), modern dialysis and a lab capable of doing toxicology, immuno essays, pathlab, biochem and genetics.
- Train more nurses, doctors and other sub speciality professionals, including; cardiovascular surgeons and oncologist currently unavailable in the Gambia, pathologist currently less than 10, neurologist currently less than 10, and medical engineers/technologist (eliminate our overseas requirements to fix our machines).
- Strengthening of primary health care as envisaged by world health organisation (WHO). This would be achieved by increase enrolment, reviewing, and revising the curriculum of community nurse training programmes in Mansa Konko.
- Improve care access by having a functional and a well-managed medical transport (district ambulance) that will be available and reliable.
- Establish a National Social Care Service (NSCS) to uphold the rights of people with all forms of disabilities.
- Every person with disability shall have the legal right to mobility aid provided by the state from the day this disability is diagnosed. Furthermore, every individual with disability shall have a care plan and a social worker who ensures their needs to of care is catered for and the rights of the individual uphold.
- Any child born with a disability, and that disability is diagnosed to affect or impair their functions in taking part or attending a normal education, an Education Health Care Plan shall be created through thorough assessments of the needs of that child and map out a plan on how to provide education for that child. Schools for people with disabilities shall be established through all ages in accordance with the nations curriculum and school system. However, adjustments and adaptations will of course be required to meet the needs of the pupils.
- GDC shall harness the wealth of experience of health care professionals around the world, especially Gambians in the diaspora, and our donor partners to create this essential service for our citizens.
- Strengthen health and safety rules and regulations in the way health institutions and professionals interact with their patients.