It was organised in collaboration with the Tema Metro Office of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) and GIZ, with a number of stakeholders in the health sector attending the programme.
During the programme, new subscribers were registered onto the NHIS, while opportunity was also given to old subscribers to renew their cards.
According to Dr Yabani, the statistics were alarming and required the needed urgency to prevent increased infections among students in the metropolis.
Interventions
He attributed the rise in STI infections to the break down of families which had left many children being raised by single parents.
He pointed out that the health directorate had put in place a system by which community health officers would undertake house-to-house counselling and testing.
That, he said, was to ensure early detection for appropriate actions to be taken.
Scale up sensitisation
He expressed concern at the seeming disinterest in adolescent health issues by parents and other relevant stakeholders and stressed the need for community and opinion leaders to scale up sensitisation to curb infections.
The health directorate, he emphasised, had also engaged the Ministry of Youth and Sports in the formation of sports clubs in schools within the metropolis.
That, he pointed out, could be used to engage students and young people periodically, especially when fun games were organised.
Dr Yabani tasked parents to engaged their children and teach them about the consequences of unsafe sex.
NHIS
The Tema Metropolitan Manager of the NHIS, Nii Borkettey Bortey, said the outreach programme had become necessary to afford managers of the scheme the opportunity to identify the challenges subscribers faced.
He said officials had mapped out plans to decentralise new registration and renewals by creating registration centres in communities across the metropolis.
(Selorm) | 
(Nana Kwesi)