Bongo DCE appeals for district hospital
The Chief Executive for the Bongo District Assembly in the Upper East Region, Joseph Akasake Abaah, has appealed to the government and other institutions to help to construct a befitting district hospital for the people.
With a population of over 120,000 people, he said the current district hospital had only three wards to admit patients.
The situation, he explained, had often caused some patients who had to be admitted for a day or two to be returned home due to lack of space.
“Today, the Bongo District Hospital has only one doctor who attends to over 120,000 people and there are only three wards to admit patients,” he said.
No mortuary
Appearing before the Local Government and Rural Development public hearing last Friday, Mr Abaah lamented how women patients and nursing mothers with their children shared the same maternity ward.
“The funny thing is that even as a district hospital, we do not have a mortuary and so anytime somebody passes on, we either pick the person to the Bolgatanga Hospital mortuary or we arrange for the family to pick the corpse directly to the house.
“I know in some of these deaths, the family will need to do autopsy and this is a serious challenge in the district,” he said.
The DCE had appeared before the committee, chaired by Queenstar Maame Pokuah Sawyerr, to respond to some issues raised in the 2024 Auditor-General’s report.
Agony
Mr Abaah told the committee that as a district, since its creation 37 years ago, it has had a hospital that can only be described as a “health facility”.
“Our hospital does not befit to be called a district hospital because it is more or less a health centre because when you go to other places, the health centres are far, far even better the Bongo District Hospital.
With only three words, he expressed concern about the distance women in labour had been moved from the maternity ward to the theatre, a distance he described as “long”.
When a member of the committee, John Darko, inquired whether the legacy projects the assembly had undertaken included a district hospital, Mr Abaah retorted, “nothing of that sort”.
He pointed out that because the Bongo District shares border with Burkina Faso, there are times when people travel from Burkina Faso to access healthcare at the district hospital, leading to overcrowding.
Faced with the lack of resources to improve the situation, the DCE appealed to other institutions to assist the assembly.
Potable water
On water, Mr Abaah said the available source of drinking water in the area contained high concentration of fluoride.
To address such challenge, he said the assembly was working with Water AID, the Ghana Water Company and the Public Utility and Regulatory Commission to solve the problem.
Dwelling on the poor road network, he said the assembly was collaborating with the regional manager of the Ghana Highways Authority to improve road network in the area.
‘’We share a border with Burkina Faso and there is a trunk road that many cars travel on, but due to the condition of the road, there are numerous accidents, causing customers to lose their belongings along that route.
“As a result, people now travel through Paga and other areas without passing through Bongo and this is seriously affecting our internally-generated funds as a district,” Mr Abaah said.
On funds, the chief executive said as of September this year, the assembly had collected GH¢238,000 as internally-generated fund and received GHc6,170,421 as its share of the Common Fund.
