Carve niche for yourself - Dr Awoonor charges St Joseph Hospital

The former Director of Policy Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation of the Ghana Health Service (GHS), Dr Koku Awoonor, has charged the St Joseph Catholic Hospital in Nkwanta, in the Oti Region, to carve a niche for itself to become a centre of medical speciality in the country.

He said the hospital could, among other things, consider renal disease care, adding “we know the burden of renal diseases now. We know how many people are suffering renal diseases, needing dialysis at a high cost.” He said, the hospital’s location was strategic for it.

Dr Awoonor, who was delivering the keynote address at the 50th Anniversary Celebration of the Nkwanta St Joseph Hospital last Friday, said the hospital, in carving that niche for itself, needed to re-launch its health promotion efforts against diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, obesity, cancers, mental diseases, stroke, HIV, tuberculosis, diarrhoea and road traffic accidents which were killing more people currently.

Recalling his first visit to Nkwanta in 1992, Dr Awoonor said he was there on an outreach to support and provide services as that became a weekly feature when he was stationed at St Mary Theresa Catholic Hospital at Dodi Papase as a Medical Officer with responsibility also for Kadjebi as District Medical officer.

Critical health service

He said the many nights of critical health service referrals, man hours spent to travel to Ho and Accra for medicines, logistics and supplies, the first emergency surgery undertaken in the OPD consultation room of the St Joseph clinic which was followed by the design and construction of a theatre to provide surgical emergency services have yielded positive results.

He said inasmuch as there was improvement in the health of the Ghanaian in the past 50 years, it was also important to reflect on some of the critical indicators, saying life expectancy had increased from 49 years in 1965 to 64 years in 2021 while under five mortality of 218,000 live births in 1960 had reduced to 47.5 in 2020.

Modern ways

For his part, the Catholic Bishop of the Jasikan Diocese, Most Rev. Bishop Gabriel Mantey, advised workers of the hospital to adopt modern ways of doing things, saying “avoid the enslavement by your past; we have always done it like this and will continue doing it like that.

If you are enslaved by your past, consider yourself a dead person.”

For his part, the Director of the Christian Health Association of Ghana (CHAG), Dr Peter K. Yeboah, said the country’s resolve to achieve universal health coverage by 2030 called for partnership to address some existential challenges which required that St Joseph Hospital repositioned itself as an elite hospital with the prospect and potential to impact the world.