The National Ambulance Service has bemoaned the fact that a great deal of hospitals do not cooperate with it in handling emergency cases.
According to the Public Relations Officer of the Ghana Health Service, Simon Yusif Kawula, the lack of the much needed cooperation on the part of the health faciities hampers the efficient delivery of the work of the service.
“Many hospitals don’t cooperate with us in some cases. Recently we picked a patient at Taifa to a certain hospital (I don’t want to mention the name of that particular hospital). We went to five different hospitals in Accra and they did not accept the case because they said they didn’t know any relative of the patient. It took our Operations Director to personally pay for the folder of the patient before the patient was admitted. Sometimes we pick a patient who’s in critical condition at the wayside because that person is a Ghanaian and pays tax we can leave anybody to die. But when we take such cases to the hospital then it becomes our burden to find a place to lay the patient,” he told Bonohene Baffour Awuah on Ghana Kasa show on Kasapa FM/Agoo TV Friday.
Simon Yusif Kawula further called for effective collaboration between the Ghana Health Service, Mission Hospitals, and the National Ambulance Service to ensure that persons in critical condition are given urgent attention.
“I say this because sometimes we get to the hospital and we’re told that there’s no bed, the person has no relative around so will not be admitted then the responsibility becomes ours but we also don’t have a budget to take care of such people. A patient put on oxygen in an ambulance for a long time is a waste of resources and needs to be offloaded to a hospital.”
Source: Kasapafmonline.com/102.5FM
