Welcome to Korle Bu Teaching Hospital - Ghana's Premier health facility
The Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital (KBTH) is the premier health care facility in Ghana.
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Lack of adequate equipment and doctors are killing the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital, Ghana’s premier heath facility and Africa’s third largest hospital.
It is one of three tertiary hospitals in the country. It is also a referral centre for the World Health Organisation (WHO) in West Africa.
Korle Bu, was established as a General Hospital to address the health needs of the indigenous people under Sir Gordon Guggisberg's administration, the then Governor of the Gold Coast. However, demand on the hospital grew and by 1953, it started adding new structures, such as the maternity, medical, surgical and child health blocks.
Affiliated with the University of Ghana Medical School, today it has three centres of excellence, which are the National Cardiothoracic Centre, the National Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery and the Radiotherapy Centres. It also has 17 clinical and diagnostic departments and units.
The clinical and diagnostic Departments/Units of the hospital include Medicine, Child Health, Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Pathology, Laboratories, Radiology, Anaesthesia, Surgery, Polyclinic, Accident Centre and the Surgical/Medical Emergency as well as Pharmacy. Other Departments includes Pharmacy, Finance, Engineering, and General Administration.
The Hospital also provides sophisticated and scientific investigative procedures and specialisation in various fields such as Neuro-surgery, Dentistry, Eye, Ear Nose and Throat (ENT), Renal, Orthopaedics, Oncology, Dermatology, Cardiothoracic, Radiotherapy, Radio diagnosis, Paediatric Surgery and Reconstructive Plastic Surgery and Burns.
Established on October 9, 1923, the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital has grown from an initial 200 bed capacity to 2,000.
It is currently the third largest hospital in Africa. It has an average daily attendance of 1,500 patients and about 250 patient admissions.
The Reconstructive Plastic Surgery and Burn Centre, the National Cardiothoracic Centre and the National Centre for Radiotherapy and Nuclear Medicine in particular also draw a sizeable number of their clientele from neighbouring countries such as Nigeria, Burkina Faso and Togo.
Korle Bu Teaching Hospital continues to blaze the trail when it comes to the introduction of specialised services. Research work at the hospital led to the discovery of yellow fever. This resulted in the development of a vaccine against that disease. It is one of the few hospitals in Africa where DNA tests are carried out. Other specialised services the hospital provides include brachytherapy intervention for the treatment of prostate cancer and keyhole surgeries.
However, today the KBTH, Ghana’s foremost referral hospital, is now a far cry from what is expected of such a facility nearly a century after its establishment, as the hospital struggles to adequately care for its patients.
It has been grappling with obsolete equipment or the unavailability of it because the old ones have given way and have not been replaced. For instance, there have been periods when there were no operating theatre tables, ventilators, suction machines, monitors and anaesthetic machines.
At a point, pregnant women had to use the staircase before they could access the theatre at the maternity ward on the sixth floor because the two lifts in the building hardly works.
On Wednesday, May 6, 2015 Ghanaians woke up to the rude shock that Korle Bu which is described as the last resort for any ailment was turning away patients because it did not have enough doctors.
The hospital was said to be grappling with shortage of doctors at its Out-Patients Department (OPD) and was only attending to specialised, emergency outpatient cases as well as preparing patients for the theatre. Other patients whose conditions were not critical were turned away to seek treatment elsewhere.
The gap in the number of doctors at the hospital became evident when one hundred and fifty (150) House Officers who had provided essential services at the OPD, completed their housemanship and left the hospital, leading to the suspension of some services.
Meanwhile, management of the hospital has announced that a new batch of House Officers was expected soon. House officers are fresh doctors who have graduated from Medical School.
Aside the shortage of human resources at the facility, it gets to a point where in some of the hospital’s departments such as the Accident and the Surgical Medical Emergency centres, patients were given infusion as they sat in chairs or lie on benches because there were no beds.
Over the years, people including a former Chief Executive Officer of Korle Bu, Professor Nii Otu Nartey, has called for the privatisation of the facility to enhance its services.
According to him, to enhance the capacity of the hospital to deal with its challenges, the hospital should be allowed to run more like a private institution in order to raise the necessary funds to make it more efficient.
He said although the government paid the salaries of the members of staff, payment for services under the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) and payments made by patients for consumables were inadequate, causing the hospital to continuously run at a loss.
Writer's email: [email protected]
A Daily Graphic publication in collaboration with Ouestaf News and with support from Osiwa.