It’s high time parliament legislates organ donation in Ghana – Korle-Bu CEO

The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital, Dr. Opoku Ware Ampomah, has called on the Parliament of Ghana to consider the legislation of organ donation.

According to him, the nation has the capacity to pass it into law hence the need to give it the utmost attention it deserves to salvage lives from being lost.

He indicated that in 2006/2007, a group of health personnel embarked on advocacy for its passage but their efforts proved futile.

In an interview with Daniel Oduro on the Low Down Show on Ghanaweb TV, Dr. Opoku Ware Ampomah believes it is a good time for parliament to make efforts for the drafted legislation to be facilitated and subsequently passed into a bill to facilitate the delivery of service to patients.

“I believe that there's a good time to do that because maybe previously we didn't even have the capacity to do some of these things, so then those would have been redundant anyway. But then, now that we have the capacity to do so, I think this is the time to seriously look at those laws and pass them so that they will facilitate the delivery of the service to our patients.

“Just to give you a bit of background, about around 2005/ 2007, some of our predecessors, Professor Yabo and Co, started this drive and wanted to, but it didn't go too far. And so we've taken it up again,” the CEO of Korle-bu Teaching Hospital told Ghanaweb TV.

Dr. Opoku Ware Ampomah noted that a committee has been tasked to lobby for the legislation of organ donation in Ghana.

He added that engagement with relevant stakeholders who could help with the process has already started and he is optimistic that their aim of legislating organ donation in Ghana will come to fruition this time around.

‘We have a committee that's already working on this.

We've approached some of the members of the Parliamentary Select Committee for help.

We are going to formally invite and engage them so that they understand which law we're trying to pass. And then they also bring their own so that it can then be appropriately fashioned out and then go to the necessary stages for it to be passed as a law.

“We've done some informal work on the ground just to sound out some of the key stakeholders, but this is something that I believe is of national importance and so we need to consider it seriously.

“At the moment, we have an ethics committee that looks into this because, we do not want the situation where somebody is donating a kidney out of coercion” he noted.

BS/WA

Ghana’s leading digital news platform, GhanaWeb, in conjunction with the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital, is embarking on an aggressive campaign which is geared towards ensuring that parliament passes comprehensive legislation to guide organ harvesting, organ donation, and organ transplantation in the country.

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