Has UHAS escaped President Mahama’s radar?
President John Mahama delivered a well-crafted State of the Nation address (2015) that sufficiently acknowledged the power crises currently bedevilling the nation with proposed solutions and timelines.
He, however, also succeeded in raising very worrying signals about his ability to provide the newly established University for Health and Allied Sciences (UHAS) the needed resources that will position it as the leading health training institution in the country and a major global player.
Going into the State of the Nation address, what were the expectations of keen watchers of UHAS’s current struggles and did the President meet them? Two examples will suffice.
Worrying signals
In 2014, UHAS admitted its first batch of medical students. As exciting as this development was, the Chairman of Council, Prof. Kofi Anyidoho, raised very worrying signals on the occasion of the swearing in of the new governing council by the Minister of Education, Prof. Naana Jane Opoku-Agyeman in Ho. Prof. Anyidoho paid glowing tribute to the hard work of the Chinese Yanjian Group as they rapidly built lecture halls, auditorium, multi-purpose science laboratory, administration block and residential facilities for both staff and students at the university’s permanent site at Sokode.
“Without any hesitation by next academic year, we should use the campus because they are determined to hand over the place to us by March (2015)’’ declared Prof. Anyidoho.
Very clearly, however, the diligence of the Chinese government was unmatched by local contractors Ussuya Ghana who had steadfastly refused to commence works on the access roads of the university campus. The work of the Yanjian group was being hampered and transfer of materials to the site challenged.
“‘Our real challenge now, they may be many; as you can see there are no roads, contract for the roads was awarded and according to that contract, the roads should have been done by this time but as you can see, they have not even started. So those buildings may be completed by March 2015, but how do we bring students here without a road network?’’ quizzed Prof. Anyidoho.
Expectations
There was, therefore, a clear expectation that the President will speak to the matter of executing a road network to support the university’s growing permanent infrastructure. Did he meet this expectation?
Well, the President spoke about many road projects — trunk and feeder, far and near, but for UHAS, he was loudly silent on the fate of the Sokode University roads or the chronic under performance of Ussuya Ghana!
In effect, the blunt refusal of Ussuya Ghana to fulfil its obligations without any punitive repercussions, hampering ongoing work in the process, will not improve!
Sometime in 2014, Prof. Fred Binka, the UHAS Vice Chancellor, envisioned a practical deviation from the worrying ‘clustering’ norm observed in other Ghanaian medical schools in another interview.
Speaking to the UHAS model, Binka pointed out that ‘UHAS’s strategy aims to deviate from the norm where the location of teaching hospitals has seen an over concentration of health professionals in the regional capital even as hospitals in surrounding districts suffer crippling shortages of key staff thereby raising fundamental questions about whether the full benefits of a present and functional medical school have been maximised … The UHAS model plans to strengthen both the centre – the teaching hospital – and surrounding existing district hospitals which would all be deployed as training sites with specialists on site to serve as faculty for medical students on rotation.’
Co-ordinated policy initiative
Going into the President’s State of the Nation address, keen observers were again on the lookout for a co-ordinated policy initiative backed by resource alignment in support of this noble vision outlined by the vice chancellor.
Did the President meet this expectation?
Among the eight major hospital projects lined up by the President to provide Ghana an additional 6000 hospital beds, the Volta Regional Hospital, which UHAS is hoping will be upgraded to the status of a Teaching Hospital in time for clinical training, was conspicuously missing.
Admittedly, the National Medical Equipment Replacement Programme has been expanded to cover 150 hospitals across the country including “all teaching hospitals, all regional hospitals, 125 district hospitals, 14 health centres and eight mobile clinics” with equipment including “new Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Computerised Tomography (CT) Scan, Fluoroscopy, X-ray and Digital Mammography machines, Oxygen Plants, and Ambulances.”
What is obvious, however, is that this ongoing medical equipment replacement programme, though a laudable intervention, does not appear to be directly linked to and actively supporting UHAS’s well-outlined aspirations.
Isolated interventions
While I cannot contest the President’s assertion that the “St. Joseph Hospital in Nkwanta, the Adidome Hospital, the Dodi Papase Hospital and the Jasikan Government Hospital, all in the Volta Region have also benefited from the National Medical Equipment Replacement Programme”, I can also not deny that these interventions appear at best isolated, regardless of any coordinated plan to equip a central teaching hospital and carefully selected satellite district hospitals to be used as university field sites in furtherance of the UHAS model for practical community-based and research-oriented medical education.
In the event, we are legitimately constrained to ask the valid question of whether the many crying needs of the three-year old university have so soon gone off the President’s radar!
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