88 new district hospitals won't be ready before elections – Health Minister

When the COVID-19 pandemic reached Ghana and exposed the lapses in Ghana’s healthcare infrastructure, President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo said government was going to undertake the largest healthcare infrastructure investment in the history of the country which will see the construction of 88 new district hospitals across the country within a year.

Asked whether any of the promised hospitals will be ready for operation before the December 7 General Election, Health Minister Kwaku Agyeman-Manu in an interview with Citi TV during the New Patriotic Party’s manifesto launch in Cape Coast on Saturday outrightly said no.

According to the minister, government is still in the preliminary stages of the project with lands being acquired in the various districts.

“We are still in the preliminary stages… We have asked all the districts without hospitals to give us land, they have all submitted. We now have people who are going round inspecting the lands to see which areas are good, which areas cannot be good."

President Akufo-Addo in his eighth address to the nation on measures taken against COVID-19 in Ghana said the hospitals to be built will be 100 standard bed facilities which will be in districts without hospitals and will also have accommodation for staff.

“There are 88 districts in our country without district hospitals; we have six (6) new regions without regional hospitals; we do not have five infectious disease control centres dotted across the country; and we do not have enough testing and isolation centres for diseases like COVID-19. We must do something urgently about this. That is why Government has decided to undertake a major investment in our healthcare infrastructure, the largest in our history. We will, this year, begin constructing 88 hospitals in the districts without hospitals,” he said.