Outsourcing of Clinical and Non-Clinical Services in Hospitals in Ghana

After the decoupling of the Ghana Health Service (GHS) the early 2000s, the service launched a new program titled the “Medium Term Health Strategy (MTHS)”. This program aims to establish a more equitable, efficient, accessible and responsive health care system in Ghana. The purpose of these reforms in Ghana, as in other countries, was to ensure efficiency in resource allocation and to develop an innovative health care system that is better capable of responding to patient expectations as well as enabling high quality service delivery.

Consequently, the Health Strategy Program has created radical changes in the financing, provision and organization of health care services (Anonymous, 2011). Van de Ven, (1996) suggested that radical strategy in health system management has always stimulated competition in the health care sector and directed hospital management to further focus on quality and efficiency issues in health care services. In such an environment, hospital managers have to develop new strategies in order to survive and adapt to rapidly changing conditions. Outsourcing has become the preferred strategic option for hospital managers to overcome competition.

Outsourcing is the process whereby an organisation transfers activities, which were previously undertaken in-house, to an external service provider, allowing the organisation to divest itself of operational responsibility, but not accountability, for the conduct of that activity (Quinn and Hilmer 1994). Outsourcing has been widely adopted by organisations as a key corporate strategy (Corbett 2004; Doyle 2003), and the demand for outsourced goods and services is expected to grow dramatically in the foreseeable future (Brown and Wilson 2005; Willmott 2005).

The Brong Ahafo Region currently has twenty-four (24) Government, Mission, Quasi-Government and Private Hospitals. These 24 hospitals serve a total 1,912,396 and well over 81,607 outpatient attendance and inpatients admissions