The Kumasi Metropolitan Assembly (KMA) has launched an anti-stigma campaign to rehabilitate persons with COVID-19 who have recovered and orientate society towards the disease.
The campaign intends to contribute to the national efforts to change attitudes, beliefs and behaviour towards persons diagnosed with COVID-19.
The Chief Executive of the KMA, Mr Osei Assibey Antwi, said the COVID-19 Response Team of the metropolis had designed an anti-stigma campaign to, among other things, deal with community uprising against holding bays and isolation centres; fear and anxiety associated with sharing spaces and items with recovered patients to the extreme cases of divorces and strained relationships.
He said it would also deal with the unwillingness of patients to disclose their symptoms or status, which placed health workers and neighbours at unnecessary risk.
The team would also deal with name calling and alienation of survivors and their families, and fear and anxiety of re-integration into the society.
Contact tracing
The KMA chief executive stressed that it would also deal with hostility towards contact tracing efforts and refusal to admit to testing.
He said the Response Team had embarked on a series of media and community anti-stigma campaigns in the metropolis when some survivors were confronted with stigmatisation,
including they and their families being treated like outcasts.
The Head of the Psychiatry Department of the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital (KATH), Dr Ruth Owusu-Antwi, commended the KMA for the initiative and noted that as people with COVID-19 became aware of public stigma and its related discriminatory practices, they internalised the perceived stigma and applied it to themselves, leading to self stigma.
She said the educational anti-stigma interventions should be geared towards presenting factual information about COVID-19 with the goal to dispel misconceptions and misinformation and contradicting negative attitudes and beliefs.
She expressed the hope that the education would counter inaccurate stereotypes or myths and fear by replacing them with factual information that, for example, “everyone who has been diagnosed with Covid-19 will die” by showing statistics in Ghana to prove that the current rate was 0.72 per cent.
Commendation
The Ashanti Regional Minister, Mr Simon Osei-Mensah, who launched the programme, praised the KMA for their pragmatic efforts and urged all municipal and the district assemblies to emulate the example.
He also commended the Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, for his contributions during and after the restriction of movement in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Chief Executive Officer of KATH, Dr Oheneba Owusu-Danso, said the teaching hospital had put in place measures to avert the pandemic, stressing that it had been providing periodic education to their frontline workers to have the much needed knowhow to counter the virus.
