Minister of Health, Hon. Kwabena Mintah Akandoh, has called on African medical regulators to fast-track the development of continent-wide standards for telemedicine, artificial intelligence and cross-border clinical practice, warning that regulatory systems across the continent must evolve as quickly as the technologies now reshaping healthcare delivery.
The Minister made the call while delivering his keynote at the opening of the 28th Annual Scientific Conference of the Association of Medical Councils of Africa (AMCOA), held in Accra, where regulators, policymakers and health professionals from across the continent gathered to deliberate on the future of medical regulation.
Framing his address around the link between regulation, patient safety and universal health coverage, Hon. Akandoh argued that government investment in free or subsidised healthcare only delivers real value when the professionals providing that care are properly trained, licensed and held to defined standards.
“Access without quality is incomplete, and coverage without competence can expose people to harm.”
Ghana’s Minister of Health, Hon. Kwabena Mintah Akandoh,
He said regulation must therefore be responsive on four fronts responsive in speed, so that verifying a health worker’s qualifications does not take months, responsive in reach, so citizens can easily confirm whether a practitioner treating them is duly licensed, responsive in rigour, so that complaints against practitioners are investigated and resolved fairly, and responsive in scope, so that regulatory frameworks address the healthcare realities of today rather than those of two decades ago.
Workforce Growth Outpacing Regulatory Capacity
Turning to the state of Africa’s health workforce, the Minister cited figures showing that the continent’s health workforce expanded from 4.3 million professionals in 2019 to 5.72 million by 2024, with more than 325,000 graduates now entering the sector annually.
Despite this growth, he noted, Africa still falls significantly short of the workforce numbers required to meet its healthcare needs, with shortages reportedly running as high as almost 90 percent in some assessments.
According to the Minister, this gap underscores the urgency of coordinated action on financing, retention and regulation.
He pointed to two major gatherings held in Accra this year the Africa Health Workforce Investment Forum and Ghana’s Annual Health Summit both of which converged on the need for competency-based training, accreditation, continuous professional development, fitness-to-practice assessments and improved workforce data systems.
Building on those conversations, Akandoh proposed that regulators adopt a fourth guiding principle alongside the now-familiar mantra of workforce planning, urging the sector to move beyond simply planning, training and retaining professionals to also prioritising sound regulation as a pillar of workforce strategy.
Government Commits to Decentralised Specialist Training
The Minister used the platform to reaffirm government’s commitment to expanding access to specialist medical training beyond Ghana’s major cities.
He said authorities are working to decentralise specialist training programmes, broaden postgraduate training opportunities closer to where health services are actually needed, and strengthen competency-based training models nationwide.
He added that government is also working to ensure practitioners have access to the infrastructure and equipment necessary to practise at the standards expected of them, describing this as a three-way arrangement in which practitioners uphold competence and ethics, regulators safeguard standards on behalf of the public.
Government supplies the enabling environment that makes good practice possible a compact he said justifies continued state investment in equipment, specialist training and advanced care capacity, including cardiac services.
New Frontiers: Telemedicine, AI and Task-Sharing
A significant portion of the Minister’s address focused on emerging challenges posed by digital health technologies.
He posed a series of questions he said African regulators must urgently confront, how to regulate a telemedicine consultation that crosses national borders; how to define safe scopes of practice as task-sharing arrangements expand; and how artificial intelligence tools that inform clinical decisions should be governed.
Properly regulated, he argued, telemedicine could extend specialist expertise into underserved communities, while clearly defined scopes of practice could safely widen the health workforce’s capacity, and appropriately calibrated standards for artificial intelligence could allow African countries to adopt the technology on their own terms.
He maintained that expanding regulatory frameworks to keep pace with these realities need not come at the expense of patient safety, insisting that responsiveness and rigour could advance together.
Call for Cross-Border Trust And Mutual Recognition
The Minister also urged AMCOA to take a leading role in strengthening credential and licence verification systems across Africa, promoting regulatory intelligence-sharing among national medical councils, and developing common continental approaches to emerging issues such as artificial intelligence and telemedicine.
He questioned why a qualification rigorously verified by one trusted African regulator should be treated as though it starts from zero when a professional seeks to practise in another African country, arguing that fragmented national systems waste resources by separately solving problems the continent already shares collectively.
Building trust across borders, he said, would allow African institutions to jointly answer a defining question of the moment.
“Are our regulatory systems keeping pace with the societies we are called to protect?”
Ghana’s Minister of Health, Hon. Kwabena Mintah Akandoh,
Hon. Akandoh closed his submissions by urging closer collaboration among regulators, faster and safer verification systems, smarter use of regulatory data, and common African responses to challenges that no longer respect national borders.
He reminded delegates that the ultimate purpose of regulation was not to regulate more, but to regulate better a principle he said underpins the broader goal of universal health coverage.
The 28th AMCOA conference continues in Accra, bringing together medical regulators and health leaders from across the continent to chart the future of medical practice standards in Africa.
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