COVID-19: Ghana's President to build 94 new hospitals to improve quality health delivery

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COVID-19: Ghana's President to build 94 new hospitals to improve quality health delivery

The President of Ghana, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has unveiled plans by his Government to construct 88 new district and six regional hospitals across the country in addition to the existing health facilities. This is to give equal access and improve on the quality of health service delivery in Ghana.

According to Nana Addo, Government had decided to undertake those major investments in the healthcare infrastructure, which he said is going to be the largest in Ghana’s history.

In his 8th Coronavirus update titled: Address to the nation, the President admitted that “the coronavirus has revealed the unequal distribution of healthcare facilities, as we have tended to focus our infrastructure on Accra and one or two of our other big cities”.

Nana Akufo-Addo explained that there were eighty-eight (88) districts in Ghana without district hospitals; and six (6) new regions without regional hospitals. Adding that; “we do not have 5 infectious disease control centres dotted across the country; and we do not have enough testing and isolation centres for diseases like COVD-19”.

In the breakdown of the 88 district hospitals, President Akufo-Addo said that ten (10) would be in Ashanti, nine (9) in Volta, nine (9) in Central, eight (8) in Eastern, seven (7) in Greater Accra, seven (7) in Upper East, five (5) in Northern and five (5) in Oti regions. There would also be five (5) in Upper West, five (5) in Bono, four (4) in Western North, four (4) in Western, three (3) in Ahafo, three (3) in Savannah, two (2) in Bono East, and two (2) in North East Regions.

He indicated that each of the facilities would be a quality standard-design one hundred bed hospital with accommodation for doctors, nurses and other health workers, and the intention is to complete them within a year.

“We have also put in place plans for the construction of six (6) new regional hospitals in the six (6) new regions, and the rehabilitation of the Effia Nkwanta Hospital, in Sekondi, which is the regional hospital of the Western Region. We are going to beef up our existing laboratories, and establish new ones across every region for testing. We will establish three (3) infectious disease control centres for each of the zones of our country, i.e. Coastal, Middle Belt and Northern, with the overall objective of setting up a Ghana Centre for Disease Control.

The recent, tragic CSM outbreak, with over forty (40) deaths, has reaffirmed the need for ready access to such infectious disease control centres, even though, in our time, nobody should die of the disease.

Ghana has completed the analysis of another thirty two thousand, and thirty one (32,031) samples, bringing the number of tests from sixty-eight thousand, five hundred and ninety-one (68,591) to one hundred thousand, six hundred and twenty two (100,622). From this pool, the total number of confirmed infections have gone from one thousand and forty-two (1,042), to one thousand, five hundred and fifty (1,550).

The recoveries are now one hundred and fifty-five (155), and deaths eleven (11). The two (2) new cases of deaths, like the other nine (9), are all of persons with underlying health issues, what the doctors call comorbidity. The President noted.