Construction of US$52m Airport City Hospital begins
Construction of the fully funded Airport City Hospital and Medical Centre, planned to be the best-equipped private hospital in Ghana, has begun in Accra.
The 300-bed hospital, when fully functional, will meet international standard in terms of the services it offers and the quality of medical care.
Its target is meeting the health needs of Ghanaian and West African patients, including those who currently travel to other parts of the world to seek medical attention.
Designed by Archimedes India to be built as a turnkey project by an international firm, supported by one of Ghana’s cutting-edge architectural firms and local contractors, the hospital will have a 50-bed Intensive Care Unit (ICU) which can be expanded to accommodate 70 beds, by converting rooms into ICU beds to cater for any increased load in emergency situations.
The hospital will also have a six-bed Neo Natal Intensive Care Unit and a 20-cubicle Emergency Room and Trauma Centre which can be expanded into 50 cubicles. It will also have 220 private rooms (including 20 paediatric beds). Every in-patient floor will have a duty doctor’s sleeping room, lounge for doctors and a small library and a nurses’ restroom and nurses’ lounge.
Research centres
It will also have research institutes or centres for Neurology, Lung, Cardiovascular, Cardiac Surgery, Gastroenterology Diseases, Endocrinology, Orthopedics, General Surgery, Urology, Gynaecology, Paediatrics, Pediatric Surgery, Telemedicine and Special Surgeries.
The idea of constructing such a hospital was initiated by Dr Joseph Awasi Boateng, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Airport City Hospital Company Limited, the company which is developing the Airport City Hospital, in 1999. He has since worked diligently, surmounting legions of problems to realise his dream of introducing private tertiary medical care into the Ghanaian healthcare market.
School of medicine
In an exclusive interview with Daily Graphic, Dr Boateng revealed that a component of the project is a planned first private medical school in Ghana. The school, to be known as the St Joseph School of Medicine, will be located on a 1,000-acre land in the Shai Osudoku area.
Acute medical care
He said the project represent the culmination of very meticulous thought-out plans for a project that filled a very unique market niche— acute medical care in Ghana and West Africa.
“The niche that it fills is the high-end medical care where the most serious acute medical emergencies and diseases which demand a high level of physician expertise and sophisticated equipment are diagnosed and treated. This super tertiary health care is the part of the spectrum of medical care which is mostly unavailable in Ghana and other West African countries,” said Dr Boateng.
He pointed out, however, that this niche was not necessarily reserved for the rich. “It is the niche where all of us, whether rich or poor, young or old, currently healthy or not, could urgently need, without warning and sometimes with little time to spare. This niche is well-filled in the developed economies and in some developing countries such as South Africa, India, Thailand and Vietnam.’
The need for tertiary hospitals in Ghana goes without saying, “We as a people deserve the same quality of healthcare, for ourselves, our families and our dependents as any persons in other countries”.
He was of the view that as Ghana continues to attract nationals of more developed countries and as “ we expand our economy and garner and expect respect as a nation, we will need to improve the quality of our medical care. This project, at this time, therefore represents one of the boldest efforts to meet the demand for super specialty tertiary care in Ghana”.
He told Daily Graphic: “We carefully studied the market; its demographic and epidemiologic characteristics, its growth rate and the demographic characteristics of this growth. We looked at income levels and how these will progress as the economy expanded. We looked at the nature and the epidemiology of diseases attendant to these demographic and economic transitions and the rise in the incidence of chronic diseases and cancers as those of infections and communicable diseases decline. We looked at the rate of inflow of expatriates. We were this meticulous for a simple reason; the project has to be viable financially.”
The reason why viability is so important, he added, “is that as laudable as a project of this nature is, it must be able to continually improve, buy new equipment, bring on new technologies and new and more advanced services as they become available in the world of medicine. And it must provide above-average return on investment. The investment must grow and thrive. It must be a worthwhile investment into the future”.
