Celebrating Korle-Bu

The Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital has played a critical role in efficient health delivery in the country.
Located in the nation’s capital, the hospital, as a referral health facility, has served the needs of people throughout the country and beyond.

It has won international acclaim with the establishment of the National Cadiothoracic Centre where many people in search of heart surgery have gone to.

Even today as we observe the 90th anniversary of the country’s premier health facility, Korle-Bu requires massive rehabilitation, as some of the facilities are in various stages of disrepair.

The Out-Patients Department is always overcrowded, the Emergency Centre overstretched, with patients sleeping on the floor and on benches, while the Children’s Maternity and Surgical wards shut down frequently because of inadequate facilities.

Successive governments have done their best to improve the facilities at the hospital to make it the centre of excellence, but there is still room for improvement.

The challenges facing the health sector, and for that matter Korle-Bu, are not limited to disrepair; the frequent industrial actions have also brought health services to their knees.

Besides the challenge of strikes that have rocked the health sector and poor conditions under which health professionals work, there is the problem of lack of commitment to work on the part of health workers.

When the people released land for the project in 1921, they were not only looking at the compensation that will come their way but also the healthcare delivery that would come closer to their doorstep.

That objective has been achieved, but we should do everything within our resources to maintain Korle-Bu as the nation’s most critical health facility by allocating the required resources to it to bring up all its facilities to standard.

This objective is a Herculean one, but if we all accept that health is wealth, then it will not be difficult to provide the resources to put the health system on an even keel to provide quality health for the people, so that they can improve productivity.

As we join all Ghanaians to celebrate the 90th anniversary of Korle-Bu, we remind all the workers at the facility to work hard to make health care more accessible to the people.

The Daily Graphic also thinks with the National Health Insurance Scheme in place, healthcare delivery has been made more accessible to the people.

However, going forward, we advise the management of the hospital never to repeat the illegality it visited on some people about two weeks ago when it increased some fees without parliamentary approval.

On the 90th milestone of the hospital, the Daily Graphic commends the workers for their sacrifices to provide quality health care for the people.

We also urge the government to allocate more resources to the hospital to speed up the process of rehabilitating the facilities to enable it to provide quality services for the people.

We salute the founding fathers of the hospital, particularly Governor Gordon Guggisburg, who laid the foundation for the hospital, the landowners and the pioneer workers for their foresight and the sacrifices they made to establish Ghana’s foremost health facility.

Daily Graphic/Ghana