In July this year, tragedy struck the medical fraternity. Dr. Kwame Adu Ofori, a man who had spent his life saving others, suffered a heart attack. He urgently needed a percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI), a procedure that would have opened the blocked vessel and restored blood flow. In most countries, this is standard emergency care. But in Ghana’s second largest teaching hospital, Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital (KATH), there was no catheterization laboratory (cath lab). In fact, there was none in Kumasi at all.
So this doctor, who had dedicated his life to saving people, died waiting to be transported to Accra. He became a victim of the very system he served, a system that failed him at the moment he needed it most.
The Trauma of Our “Specialist” Hospitals
Last month, a close friend’s mother collapsed and was admitted to the Trauma and Specialist Hospital in Winneba. This is a facility meant to serve as the last referral point for the Municipality and beyond. In fact, when the Central Regional Hospital was upgraded to a teaching hospital 2013, the Trauma Hospital became the interim regional hospital in 2016.
One would expect such a hospital to be well-equipped. But when we needed a CT scan, it was unavailable. We had to transport the patient to Swedru, and it took almost 24 hours before the results came. When further imaging was needed, it was even more pathetic.
A doctor, visibly frustrated, confided in me: “I will never bring any family member of mine to this hospital.” Imagine those words coming from someone sworn to save lives, but stripped of the tools to do so.
And when the referral was finally prepared to move the patient to Accra, the hospital could not release its ambulance. Their excuse? “We don’t have enough staff to deploy with it.” The national ambulance service was the next option, but the telephone at the emergency unit was not even working. The doctor had to use his own phone to call the ambulance. That was when the doctor looked me in the face and said: “You see what I told you.”
When the Caregivers Themselves Become the Risk
Beyond broken machines and empty laboratories lies another demon: the attitude of some health workers. In 2021, my younger sister, Emmanuella, was rushed to Winneba Trauma Hospital, coughing severely and spitting blood. I arrived to find her lying helpless panting for breath while nurses looked on. No one attended to her until I angrily intervened. When they finally prescribed medicine, I tried to pay with mobile money, but was told the hospital only accepted cash. I had to abandon her, gasping for breath, just to find cash outside.
That same day, another patient was assessed in front of me. After checking vitals, the nurse turned to her colleague, I overheard her casually guessing a patient’s diagnosis with her colleague: “The temperature is this, the pressure is that, it could be malaria, right?” To them it was a guesswork exercise. To the patient, it was life or death. I was stunned.
Sadly, this is not an isolated problem. In July 2023, 39-year-old Linda Adua died at the Central Aflao Hospital because two nurses refused to accept mobile money payment before administering treatment. By the time her relatives returned with cash, she had died. Her family has since sued the hospital for GH¢4 million.
One of the most heartbreaking examples is the story of Thomas Freeman Yeboah and his mother which I read on Pulse Ghana website. Freeman’s mother fell gravely ill and was admitted to the A.G.A. Hospital in Obuasi. Rather than being stabilized and treated with urgency, she became trapped in a cycle of repeated COVID-19 tests, delayed results, and inadequate monitoring. Her condition worsened until she eventually passed away on January 20, 2021, another casualty of negligence and systemic inefficiency.
As if that devastating loss were not enough, tragedy struck again. Freeman himself later sustained an accident and was rushed to the University of Ghana Hospital (Legon). There, instead of receiving urgent and compassionate care, he encountered the harsh reality of Ghana’s cash-and-carry system, where health insurance held no power and money became the gatekeeper to treatment. His condition deteriorated as nurses watched helplessly, leaving his wife, who happened to be a nurse herself, to intervene in desperation. But her efforts were in vain. Freeman too lost his life.
These are the kinds of experiences that erode public trust in our hospitals. These are clear examples of how the System pushes people to the edge and fuel the kind of incidents we recently heard about at Ridge Hospital, where a man allegedly assaulted nurses. Violence can never be justified and I do not condone it but when patients and families are abandoned, ignored, or extorted, frustration boils over. Having witnessed firsthand the indifference and incompetence that patients endure, I can understand the anger that drives people to the brink.
70–80% of Medical Equipment Across Ghana is Broken
The scale of the problem is staggering. Few days ago, Ghana’s Health Minister, Kwabena Mintah Akwandoh, has disclosed that 70–80% of medical equipment in health facilities across the country is non-functional. This means that most hospitals are operating with outdated, broken, or missing tools. Alarmingly, many facilities have not been refurbished since 2014.
The consequences are widespread and severe. At Takoradi Hospital, built in 1929, surgeons are forced to operate with rusty, non-adjustable beds and broken surgical lights, with no neonatal intensive care unit in place. In February this year, President John Mahama revealed that at Ridge Hospital, MRI, CT scan, and ultrasound machines have been out of service since 2022 leaving patients with no choice but to seek costly private care.
At Tamale Teaching Hospital, ventilators, MRI scanners, and sterilization tools remain non-operational, making proper care impossible for many. At Korle Bu, thieves have been cutting and stealing copper pipes used to deliver oxygen to patients putting lives at risk of suffocation during treatment.
Even securing a bed in some of these so-called top hospitals has become a bureaucratic ordeal. This is more than inefficiency. It is systemic negligence and it is silently costing lives.
A Broken System, A Nation at Risk
What ties all these cases together is one painful truth: our health system is dangerously unreliable. Equipment is unavailable in major hospitals. Referral systems are bureaucratic and slow. Dedicated doctors are demoralized. And too many health workers treat patients with indifference.
We are all human. Sickness is inevitable. But in Ghana, going to the hospital feels like a gamble where survival depends not only on your illness but on whether the system will work that day.
These stories of Dr. Kwame Adu Ofori, Emmanuella, Linda, Thomas Freeman Yeboah and his mother are not anomalies. These are not just stories. They are indictments. They are painful reminders of a systemic rot that spares no one, regardless of status, profession, or circumstance. Whether it is the lack of specialized equipment, delayed interventions, the prioritization of money over life, or the absence of accountability, Ghana’s health system continues to rob families of their loved ones in the most tragic of ways. Unless urgent and structural reforms are undertaken, the nation risks normalizing preventable deaths, leaving Ghanaians to live in constant fear that when illness or accident strikes, the system designed to save lives will instead betray them.
My simple advice is that, at your own level, do everything you can to stay healthy, because walking into a Ghanaian hospital is no guarantee of care. And until leaders rise above slogans and genuinely invest in a responsive, accountable, and humane health system, we will continue to bury our mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, and even our doctors; victims of a system that failed them.
May God grant us long life with good health, because our system is not ready to do so.
Written by:
Dr. Bismark Odum-Sackey
Lecturer, University of Education Winneba/ Communications Consultant.
