Operationalise Sawua Hospital!

In a country where V8s wheel state officials across town under the protection of siren-blowing police escorts, it is difficult to conceive that critical projects such as the construction and completion of health infrastructure have been shelved.

While the Agenda 111 hospital projects appeared audacious but exciting at the time of their conception in the heat of the COVID-19 outbreak in the country, they now look fanciful, given the struggle by the state to open and operationalise already completed health facilities.

One of these is the Ashanti Regional Hospital at Sawua, one of the gang of nine hospital projects awarded to Egyptian investment company, Euroget De-Invest, for construction across the country.

Just last week, the Ashanti Regional Health Director, Dr Emmanuel Kwadwo Tenkorang, commenting on the state of the project, admitted that it was wholly completed and furnished with all facilities and infrastructure within the scope of the contractor’s work.

What was left, he said, were the two-kilometre access road and the supply of utility connections to the 250-bed facility so that it could be made operational.

A health budget, like that of security, can hardly be compromised unless under extreme emergency circumstances.

It is even more difficult to accept that work of the scope of connecting the hospital to the national grid and providing it with a reliable water source could delay the opening of the facility to serve the people.

Under the present situation, the emergency here is the emergence of new health conditions such as monkeypox and new variants of COVID-19 even if the World Health Organisation (WHO) no longer considers the latter as a pandemic.

Ghana’s weak health system was exposed when COVID-19 emerged, with both personnel and facilities becoming stretched.

It was heartwarming that the Ga East Municipal

Hospital at Kwabenya in the Greater Accra Region, one of the functional hospitals among the gang of nine Euroget hospitals, became a major tendon in the spine of Ghana’s COVID-19 fight.

It is in this vein that the delay in the opening of the Ashanti Regional Hospital can be seen as a loss to the people of the region.

The government, through the Ministry of Health, has to step up and honour its commitment to the people of Ashanti and Ghanaians in general.

It is a moral and political imperative as we head towards elections in 2024.

It is almost inconceivable that a hospital that has been fully completed and supplied with state-of-the-art equipment will lay idle for the past one-and-a-half years because of an access road, power and water, which form the government’s part of the construction of the Sewua Hospital project.

It is well known how the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital is breaking at its seams with patient numbers.

At this rate, it is right to demand that state officials in charge of the project are made to stay on it all day, all week to ensure that they complete it in good time, and not to activate minor construction during the 2024 elections campaign period.

Euroget De-Invest deserves commendation for delivering six of the hospitals so far.

The government’s inadequacies should not tamper with the company’s efforts.

The writer is a health worker in a private facility in the Ashanti Region.