THE location of certain facilities at the Effia-Nkwanta Regional Hospital is seriously having a negative impact on the internally generated funds of the hospital and the general comfort of patients who access health care delivery there.
The hospital is located on a hill but has many of its facilities and wards separated from the emergency unit.
The accident and the emergency units are located in the valley and patients who have to access X-ray services have to be transported to the top, where the radiographic and other services are located.
This avoidable task is usually undertaken by the hospital’s ambulance, which transports the patients to access the services at the expense of the hospital.
When asked why patients don’t pay for the services they are provided, the hospital to authorities said the patients came to hospital to seek health care services, which the hospital cannot fail to provide.
‘It is not the business of the patient but the responsibility of the hospital,” the authorities said.
Another interesting thing is the location of the emergency unit. This facility is just a stone throw from the main hospital and can be covered by foot in less than two minutes. However, it is located in a valley so to access facilities of the hospital one has to climb or descend about 140 stairs.
It would have been better to use a stretcher, but because of the steepness of the valley, that is not possible.
Therefore, when the hospital’s ambulance has to go for servicing, patients have to make use of taxis or their relatives have to carry them on their back to access any service.
Work on the new emergency unit of the hospital, which was anticipated to have been completed before the Ghana 2008 has come to a standstill after the tournament ended.
Some of the hospital’s highly sensitive equipment have been left unattended to, while others have been left in the open in front of the uncompleted unit at the mercy of the weather.
According to official sources, some of the equipment is such that if the pieces were not put to immediate use, they could become defective .
The windows of the new unit are yet to be fixed, while the main theatres have just been plastered and painted. Some doctors the Daily Graphic spoke to were of the view that the walls of the theatre should have been tiled to ensure easy cleaning of blood and other stains.
That aside, the road constructed to enable ambulances drive straight to the unit has been abandoned and weeds have started growing on it.
The lifts in the various wards and the administration block of the hospital are out of order and it is very difficult to convey patients to the wards.
Many of the wards have also not been renovated for a very long time and there are cracks in the walls. Some of the rooms are so small that they cannot contain the equipment for the units.
An example is the Blood Bank. The new huge fridges for the blood bank cannot be fixed there because the Blood Bank is too small to contain them.
Interestingly, when the Daily Graphic got to the Bood Bank, the entrance to the bank was being demolished for the fridges to be moved into it.
The officials of the Blood Bank have to use one room, while patients who go there for blood or to donate it have to make use of a very narrow corridor. The tall donors cannot sit straight.
The Medical Director of the Effia-Nkwanta Regional Hospital, Dr Paul Ntodi, is requesting that the hospital be relocated on a level ground to ensure the comfort of the patients.
He said the hsopital spent a lot of money to fuel the ambulance not to perform its core functions but to shuttle between the main wards and the emergency units.
“It is not the right thing to have an emergency unit far from the wards.
The location of the hospital at the time of its establishment was perfect because it was meant for screening of military personnel for the World War II and was later converted into a hospital,” he said.
The medical director said the hospital was supposed to be training doctors and therefore it needed an environment which was different from what pertained presently.
He acknowledged that work on the new emergency ward was slow and that the hospital was not generating enough to meet its daily recurrent expenditure.
With the current wrong topography, Dr Ntodi said, the best thing was to have a regional hospital relocated on a level ground and added that at the moment the hsopital was not patient friendly, especially to those who were weak.
He, however, expressed the hope that the new unit would be completed to enable them make some savings, and also save patients the troubles they go through to access some services there.
No comments:
Post a Comment