Private dialysis hospital opens in Ho
A private dialysis hospital expected to serve people in the Oti Region and the Republic of Togo has been inaugurated at Ho in the Volta Region.
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The $ 200 million Fountain Medical Services inaugurated last Saturday also has eye and wound care units, an oxygen chamber, a laboratory, an imaging section, a general consultation area and a stand-by ambulance.
Dialysis is the process of removing excess water, solutes and toxins from the blood of people whose kidneys can no longer perform those functions naturally.
he issue of kidney-related problems has been of great public concern in recent times, with many patients dying due to the lack of adequate dialysis machines at various health facilities in the country.
According to the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the facility, Dr Anthony Kobla Kpetsey, the dialysis hospital, therefore, “is to bring healthcare services closer to the doorsteps of the people”.
He said the medium-term goal of the facility was to open obstetrics and gynaecology, maternity and paternity wards, and extend the dialysis services to other parts of the country.
Dr Kpetsey said in the long term, Fountain Medical Services would build a robust tertiary healthcare institution with a fully-equipped trauma centre to facilitate the training of healthcare professionals in Ghana and the sub-Saharan region.
He said the facility aims to ensure healthy lifestyle education to keep people out of the hospital and ensure those who needed care were fully attended to.
In that vein, Dr Kpetsey said the hospital had two holdings for patients, without overnight admissions.
He said the facility was established on a strong conviction that developing end-stage kidney failure should not be a death sentence to the patient, and wounds which were not healing should not necessarily result in amputations.
“Visual impairments should also not deny us access to quality life, and inadequate diagnostic tools should not lead to untimely deaths,” Dr Kpetsey maintained.
Medical regions
The CEO of the facility gave an assurance that the board of Fountain Medical Services had resolved to make the Volta and Oti regions the medical regions of Ghana, using modern equipment such as digital X-rays, ultrasounds, mammograms, laboratory and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines in diagnosing diseases to ensure the needs of clients were given the appropriate and prompt attention.
For now, Dr Kpetsey said, the four high-quality dialysis machines would help to provide effective services to people in the Volta and Oti regions, and their environs.
The Asafofia of Ho-Bankoe, Togbe Dzomatsi II, hailed the Fountain Medical Services for their giant breakthrough in healthcare services and a bold step in the development of the Volta Region, with reassuring relief for dialysis patients.
“This is a great complement to the government’s efforts to provide healthcare,” he noted.
A Supreme Court Judge, Justice Ernest Gaewu, who chaired the ceremony, entreated the workers to carry out their duties diligently in a culture of maintenance to ensure that it grew from strength to strength to benefit generations yet unborn.
“This has offered you decent jobs and has prospects of providing more jobs in future; you must cherish it and take the best care of it,” he said.