HOW is it like to groan and stroll from one side of a bed to another as you suck in the dry air that encases a caged bed? The journey of life seems to have come to a sudden end with all the hopes and ambitions of liberating a poverty-stricken family and a nation seem to be fast fading.
THIS was the tragic end of Patience Sakpigi, a fifteen-year-old girl, who died at the Effia Nkwanta Regional Hospital in Sekondi, in the wee-hours of Friday, 20th January, 2012. She was but an anaemic patient who had been referred to the hospital for better treatment after a doctor had diagnosed that she needed blood to stabilize her.
THE innocent girl is just one of many who die or have been maimed in our hospitals due largely to negligence and a lack of medical equipment. Is it not sheer act of wickedness and negligence on the part of the lab technician on duty on that fateful day to have demanded a bribe of GHC60.00 (according to a news item on Myjoyonline.com which story had the headline ‘Girl, 15, dies… As lab technician denies her blood) before processing blood from the hospital’s blood bank?
HERE is a mirror of Ghana’s battle of corruption that is dealing a severe blow to the society and eroding the very foundation of a society once tagged as loving and welcoming for all including foreigners. We do in fact appreciate the lack of medical facilities as a major challenge to the delivery of health care in the country hence our resolve to make sure the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) do not collapse.
ALL medical officers should therefore sit down to reflect on how painful it is to have the likes of Nkrumah’s mother buried at a crossroad where the Metro Mass Transit stops outside the hospital. It would just mean robbing the society of great men and the human resource needed to make life better.
THAT is exactly what the laboratory technician who had been trained with the tax payers’ money has done; he has destroyed a whole generation of great men and women whose signature could have changed the course of history. The memory of the Presidential Commission which investigated the death of Inusah Fuseini’s wife at the Police Hospital in May 2010 is enough assurance that the president and the powers-that-be would take this issue seriously and do like-wise.
WE at Today resolve to continue monitoring how the story would unfold because Ghana is tired of redundant employees.