President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo
President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, on Sunday, April 26, 2020, promised Ghanaians 88 new district hospitals across the country – all within a year – during his weekly update on measures the government was taking against the spread of the novel Coronavirus.
That was the president’s eighth address to the nation on the virus.
President Akufo-Addo in his address to the nation dubbed “Fellow Ghanaians” promised that the government would make sure the hospitals are delivered within one year, but as of Monday, April 26, 2021, a year on, the president is yet to deliver on the promise he made to Ghanaians.
“There are 88 districts in our country without district hospitals; we have six (6) new regions without regional hospitals; we do not have five infectious disease control centres dotted across the country, and we do not have enough testing and isolation centres for diseases like COVID-19. We must do something urgently about this. That is why government has decided to undertake a major investment in our healthcare infrastructure, the largest in our history. We will, this year, begin constructing 88 hospitals in the districts without hospitals,” he said as part of his address to the nation.
The standard 100-bed facilities which were to be in districts without hospitals were to be built with accommodation for staff.
President Akufo-Addo also promised: “Each of them will be a quality, standard-design, one-hundred-bed hospital, with accommodation for doctors, nurses and other health workers, and the intention is to complete them within a year. We have also put in place plans for the construction of six new regional hospitals in the six new regions, and the rehabilitation of the Effia Nkwanta Hospital, in Sekondi, which is the regional hospital of the Western Region.”
Infectious Disease Control Centres
Aside from the 88 district hospitals, the president also promised to build three infectious disease control centres for each of the COVID testing zones of the country which can improve testing capacities regarding contagious illnesses. These have also not been delivered.
“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,” Akufo-Addo noted.
The Regional breakdown of Akufo-Addo’s yet-to-be-constructed district hospitals are as follows:
Ashanti (10)
Volta (9)
Eastern (8)
Greater Accra (7)
Upper East (7)
Oti (5)
Upper West (5)
Bono (5)
Western North (5)
Savanna (3)
Bono East (2)
North East (2)