Healthcare delivery at the 90-year-old Takoradi Hospital in the Western Region is seriously being undermined by obsolete, rusty and nonfunctioning equipment as well as lack of essential logistics.
Since 1929, the hospital has not seen any major refurbishment, a situation that is putting pressure on health professionals at the facility.
Equipment at the theatre, according to the hospital authorities, are old and rusty. The movable surgical light has not been functioning for about five years now. Surgical beds are rusty to the extent surgeons and nurses are unable to adjust it during surgery.
“Our main operating bed; it is difficult to adjust it when you are having a difficult surgery or surgeries that you need to adjust the bed, you can’t adjust it,” the officer in charge of the theatre, Hannah Swanzey Essien, told 3news.com.
The Hospital serves thousands of residents in the Sekondi/Takoradi and its environs.
She said explained that because of the nonfunctioning of the movable surgical light, they are forced to rely on only immovable light which “becomes difficult” for surgeons, adding “even that one is rusted”.
The challenges are not peculiar to the theatre as the authorities say, the facility, which records an average deliveries of eight babies daily, has no neonatal intensive care unit.
Officer in charge of the maternity in-charge, Victoria Biddier underscored the need to have a neonatal intensive care unit to save the babies from dying.
“We need neonatal intensive care unit because it is a challenge to refer babies to Effia Nkwanta. We don’t have ambulance and sometimes the babies need oxygen to resuscitate them before they get to another facility,” she said.
Also, the hospital lacks counseling units for tuberculosis and HIV patients; a situation the medical superintendent, Dr. Fred Otuboah described as worrying.
On the back of that, authorities have appealed to individuals and organisations to help refurbish the hospital and fit it with modern equipment ahead of its 90 years anniversary in December this year.
He made the appeal at the launch of the 90th anniversary of the hospital in Takoradi.
By Loveridge Ampratwum Okyere|3news.com|Ghana