Coronavirus: Nurses ditch work over lack of protective clothing at Madina Polyclinic

The shortage of personal protective equipment at the Madina Polyclinic has led to the mass absenteeism of nurses at the health facility, an administrator has disclosed.

The situation which he describes as sad although he cannot fault them stemmed from the inability of the polyclinic to purchase new PPEs due to inadequate funds.

William Amoako told GhanaWeb when the team visited the health facility to monitor the condition and precautionary measures in place since the onset of the fast-spreading coronavirus that, despite the increased stringent measures installed by the outfit, they could not keep up since they had used all their internally generated funds to purchase the personal protective equipment.

Equipment such as gloves, face masks, sanitisers as well as bodysuits were out of stock and as a result, many of the nurses had resorted not to come to work.

He lamented that the situation was worrying since it posed a risk to the staff of the polyclinic. Mr Amoako pleaded with the government to come to their aid with supplies since they had depleted their resources.

“…we are not able to mobilise money internally to support all these equipment. We could have procured them ourselves but Health Insurance is not also paying us. So, financially we don’t have anything to do now.

We are waiting for government to come to our aid and give us some supplies, PPEs…. because we keep on buying them every day and we are just running out of cash too,” he noted.

He also explained that the number of visits to the facility had drastically reduced since the outbreak of the pandemic in the country.

Although they are practising the precautionary measures to prevent the spread of the disease, they still feel insecure since they remain unprotected and ‘naked’.



He pleaded with the nurses who had refused to report to work to come regardless to help with the situation at the facility.

“We have brought all the patients outside, OPD is outside, and now we are making sure that they being taken care of outside. We are observing the social distancing here as well… even though we are doing this, we are still at risk.

We are just begging them to come to work. Our staff are feeling reluctant to come to work because they are not protected. Medically they are naked,” he explained.