Completing Abandoned Hospitals More Important – Africa Centre For Health Policy

The Africa Centre for Health Policy (ACeHP) has advised the government to immediately complete abandoned health projects before constructing new ones.

President Nana Akufo-Addo recently announced that his government will be constructing 88 new hospitals in some districts across the country beginning this year.

Commenting on the announcement to Citi News, the Executive Director of the Centre, Ahmed Farhan noted that, “Though we have had a backlog of uncompleted or completed but not commissioned health facilities, we still have a vacuum created by the nonexistence of some of these facilities. If we have this number of facilities coming on board, it will augment the situation.”

But in the short term, he indicated that “the issue is that once you have facilities that are uncompleted, it will be appropriate that we go back and look at those.”

Touching on the distribution on face masks, the Africa Centre for Health Policy advised the government to distribute them in densely populated areas.

“You look at densely populated areas and areas that are recording more cases of COVID-19 compared with areas that are not recording more cases so that you can direct more of the face masks to areas that are densely populated and areas that are hotspots.”

Regional hospitals, Infectious disease control centres

President Nana Akufo-Addo also reiterated the government's plans to build regional hospitals in the six new regions.

In the wake of the novel coronavirus pandemic, President Akufo-Addo also noted that work will soon commence on three infectious disease control centres for each of the zones of the country to improve Ghana's testing capacities with regards to contagious illnesses.

“We are going to beef up our existing laboratories and establish new ones across every region for testing. We will establish three infectious disease control centres for each of the zones of our country, i.e. Coastal, Middle Belt and Northern, with the overall objective of setting up a Ghana Centre for Disease Control.”

“The recent, tragic CSM outbreak, with over 40 deaths, has reaffirmed the need for ready access to such infectious disease control centres, even though, in our time, nobody should die of the disease.”

----citinewsroom