Member of Parliament (MP) for Nabdam in the Upper East region, Mark Kurt Nawaane, has blamed the shortage of vital equipment in hospitals on the government’s misappropriation of resources allocated to the healthcare system.
According to him, given the amount of money allocated to the health sector, hospitals in Ghana should be well-resourced with all the equipment needed to operate and handle major health issues.
Speaking on JoyNews’ AM Show on February 1, he said “If you look at the amount of money that comes into the health sector in a year, we should be doing better than this, and I blame everybody, including the politicians, including the technocrats who are supposed to advise the politicians and probably the whole country, because we start certain things and we do not ask questions; we are just happy we started them.”
He was reacting to a recent JoyNews documentary titled “Sick Hospitals.” The documentary revealed that the Effia Nkwanta Hospital for instance, lacked basic equipment, including a defibrillator.
Mr Nawaane added that the persistent issues in the health sector were due to a lack of transparency and accountability in the use of health sector funds.
On the same show, the Deputy Ranking Member of the Health Committee in Parliament, Kwabena Mintah Akandoh, blamed the situation on the government’s ambitious Agenda 111 hospital initiative.
He argued that despite $200 million already spent on the initiative, not a single hospital bed has been added to existing hospitals.
Mr Akandoh stressed that the money could have been better spent on improving existing hospitals and ensuring they have the necessary facilities and resources.
“Since we started, we spent almost $200 million on Agenda 111, and we have not added a single bed in terms of the number of beds in the country. We have not been able to do that, so we ask ourselves, what are our aims?
“What do we want to solve? And you realize that, as a nation, honestly speaking, we are not putting our priorities right. We are simply getting everything wrong, and we are applauding when we should be condemning. This is what is happening in the country in the health sector,” he stated.
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