Gov’t to prevent Zipline Ghana from opening more facilities due to high cost – Health Minister

The government may attempt to prevent Zipline Ghana from opening more facilities due to the high cost of service fees, according to Health Minister Kwaku Agyemang Manu.

According to the Dormaa West Member of Parliament, health facilities in the country which depend on the facility to fly essential medical drugs on time to their facility for critical management of cases are abusing the service which he said is milking government funds.

The Ghana Health Service’s first senior managers meeting was held in Kumasi, where the health minister addressed various industry participants.

Expressing his frustration, the Minister said” every single request you make to fly to you comes with some huge cost so we said we are going to do essential service, very needed medications in a short time just in time. You don’t use the drone to drop medicine for you to stock. When they finished Omenako and I went there to commission the facility, I saw dewormers in their stock why will you want to fly dewormer, to be close to you?’’ he questioned.
He added “I’m engaging my big men to even stop them from setting up some new extra facilities, because we just cannot pay the cost that is coming in with fly me this amount fly me this amount fly me this. Ideally, we were setting up to fly things that if we don’t get in the next 10 minutes somebody will die and that is blood’’.

He further explained” we have our own supply chain of vaccines, now thanks to Covid-19 we have stock everywhere with cold rooms that can take every temperature across the country almost every region has got that type of facilities and we have our land Cruisers that can take in Vaccines from the airport to wherever, you are within a short possible time without any challenge so why should we fly vaccines’’

He indicated that “You see those running the drone service. I mean the drone scientists they came to install their infrastructure to make money from us we are not under any obligation to procure and make them have so much money when we don’t have anything. The agreement we have with them gives us a certain bench mark when we hit there in a month that is it. But the claims that are coming and we are seeing is a challenge’’.