Korle Bu Emergency Doctors blast management over 'patients on floor video'
A deepening rift has emerged between the management of Korle Bu Teaching Hospital and its emergency medicine residents, with the doctors firmly pushing back against suggestions that a viral video showing patients receiving care on the floor was misleading or digitally manipulated.
In a press statement issued on Monday, March 23, 2026, the Emergency Medicine Residents of KBTH accused hospital management of attempting to downplay a crisis they describe as both real and systemic.
The response came after the hospital's Chief Executive Officer, Dr Yakubu Seidu Adam, dismissed the widely circulated footage, characterising it as unrepresentative of conditions within the facility.
'An affront to patients and staff'
The residents were unequivocal in their rebuttal. "The video footage is authentic," the statement declared. "When the surge in patients exhausted all available beds, chairs were provided. When those chairs were also exhausted, patients had no option but to receive care on the floor."
They described attempts to label the footage as 'AI-generated' or 'media slander' as "factually inaccurate and an affront to both patients and staff." The statement underscored that every member of the clinical team had witnessed the sequence of events that led to patients being treated on the floor, insisting that the documentation was an accurate reflection of the pressure-cooker environment within the accident and emergency unit.
'200 beds are not enough'
The residents also took issue with management's announcement that 200 new beds had been procured to address the crisis, arguing that such headline figures do little to resolve the underlying issues plaguing the facility.
"Beds without functional oxygen points, airway equipment, monitoring tools, adequate floor space, and sufficient nursing and physician staffing ratios do not improve care," the doctors stated. "They congest an already overwhelmed space."
The group called for a "comprehensive, resourced solution" rather than what they described as token gestures that fail to address the root causes of the emergency ward's collapse.
A national crisis beyond KBTH's walls
Perhaps most significantly, the residents framed the situation at Korle Bu as a symptom of a broader systemic failure within Ghana's healthcare architecture, rather than an isolated institutional challenge.
"This crisis is a symptom of a fractured national emergency response system," the statement read, pointing to three key drivers: dysfunctional referral pathways that result in patients being "dumped" at tertiary centres because primary and secondary facilities lack capacity to hold them; absent pre-hospital coordination that sees critically ill patients arrive with no advance notice and no basic interventions initiated; and the absence of a national bed-tracking system that makes real-time patient redistribution impossible.
"We do not call for more beds in hallways," the doctors emphasised. "We call for a strengthened national healthcare grid."
Call for transparency
The residents urged both hospital management and the Ministry of Health to move beyond what they described as "PR-focused responses" and commit to transparent, systemic reform.
"The evidence is real. The crisis is real. And the response must be equally real," they concluded.
