IHDN Mission Hospital launches 10th anniversary

The International Health and Development Network, (IHDN) Mission Hospital, has launched its 10th-anniversary celebration to commemorate the successes chalked over the years.

The anniversary dubbed: “Ten years of improving the Health of the Community through Primary Health Care” is aimed at improving the health needs of the underprivileged in remote areas and grow primary health care delivery.

The event would be climaxed with a grand durbar on July 28th at the IHDN Mission Hospital, Weta-Adzadokpo in the Ketu North Municipality of the Volta Region.

Activities lined up for the anniversary include, fundraising ceremony to acquire a 70,000 dollars digital X-ray machine, commission a five-storey staff apartment and cutting of sod for the construction of a Radiology Unit.

The IHDN is an International NGO championing primary health care delivery in poor communities in Agbozume and its environs since 1996 by a group of Christians led by Dr Edem Agamah, a Ghanaian born Haematologist/Oncologist in USA.

The Network, which has its affiliates in the USA sought to develop sustainable primary health care programmes in small towns and villages in developing countries, using the “Earthly Health Care Ministry of Jesus Christ”, as the module.

In a speech read on his behalf, Dr Agamah, who is also the President of the IHDN Mission Hospital, said the group was formed in the USA in 1996 and a branch was established in Ghana and registered as an NGO in the same year.

He said they started from a humble beginning under a mango tree and later opened a clinic called IHND Family Health Clinic in their living room at Agbozume and as at 2002, with the help of volunteers from America; the clinic was able to treat over 5,000 patients each year.

Despite the closure of the clinic in 2003, he still comes to Ghana annually with medical teams and visits several villages from where patients who previously attended the clinic before its closure and attend to their health needs.

He said the current site at Weta-Adzadokpo, where the hospital is situated was donated to the IHDN by him and his wife in 2016 to construct an ultra-modern medical facility.

Dr Agamah said each year, he brings volunteers from America to team up with their Ghanaian counterparts to attend to the health needs of the people as well as share experience among themselves.

He, therefore, called on Ghanaian medical practitioners and Para- medicals to volunteer their services to the Mission’s work to cut down cost of bringing down volunteers from outside Ghana.

He also urged those medical practitioners and Para-medicals who are practicing in urban Ghana to start thinking of moving to render their services in remote areas of the country, where they are needed most.

Dr Agamah appealed to Corporate Ghana to help raise enough funds to purchase the equipments needed to give people a complete healthcare.

Mr Mark Dedzoe, The Hospital Administrator, said their outreach programmes involved helping people improve upon their physical, social, economic, educational, and spiritual wellbeing as they preach the gospel to them.

Such projects include renovation of classroom blocks, extension of pipe borne water, road construction, and scholarship for students in the area, as well as provision of entrepreneur skills programme for women.

Professor Grace Parkins, an Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeon and a pioneer volunteer on the Mission, was grateful to God and all who supported in diverse ways to sustain their dream of having a befitting hospital to give a complete healthcare delivery to the poor in society.