Staff of the Pantang Hosptial will on Wednesday embark on a demonstration to call on government to stop encroachers from taking over the frontage of the hospital after several meetings between management and various stakeholders have yielded no results with the matter getting worse by the day.
According to a senior staff member, Elvis Akuamoah, the high rate of encroachment on the hospital’s lands is posing a threat to both the hospital and staff as well as the patients.
He said several portions of the land belonging to the hospital has been encroached by private developers with someone even threatening to pull down the psychiatric hospital’s outpatient department as it allegedly stands on his land.
For years the staff have been petitioning management to do something about the encroachers as criminals now have easy access to the hospital and take advantage of that to attack some staff members on several occasions but nothing has been done.
After realising that management has been engaging with relevant stakeholders including the Ministry of Health for years without results, the staff decided to embark on a strike till they hear something positive from government.
An unknown developer has cleared a portion of land in front of the hospital’s mortuary and Mr Akuamoah says soon “there’s only going to be a wall between a private residence and our mortuary”.
Also, the access road of the regional medical stores which has been relocated to the Pantang Hospital has been blocked with a “mansion”.
Mr Akuamoah stated that they do not understand why this is happening to them when all other major hospital’s in the country do share boundaries with residential facilities and businesses.
On Monday morning, the staff refused to attend to patients that came to the hospital for treatment, including psychiatric patients and they say that will be the same situation on Tuesday.
After Wednesday’s demonstration, the staff will stay away from work till government meets their demands leaving in-patients to fend for themselves till any such day.
However a “skeleton of staff” will be on standby to attend to pregnant women, children and the aged when they visit the hospital for treatment.
