Hospitals are places where sick people go to seek health care or get cured of their illnesses. Unfortunately, this cannot be said of most of our large hospitals in the country. Some of our hospitals have become places where sick people go to die.
Last Monday, we published the sad and pathetic story of how nurses and sick people on drips in the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital have to walk long distances to fetch water for basic hygiene. This is because, for three months, water has not been running through the taps of the Hospital. The senior management of the hospital knows about this sorry state, but they do nothing.
While patients are contracting infections because of the absence of clean water, the managers sit in their air-conditioned offices and give excuses. They just sit there, do nothing and yet some President would one day get up and give them state honours.
The Managers of Korle-Bu cannot say they do not know that there has been no water for all these months. Patients die and they do not care. The sad thing is that most of these hospital administrators are medical professionals who were trained to save lives. What an irony!
The politicians in the Ministry of Health should also have known this by now, through the monitoring process. However, what interests them more is attending public functions and making long speeches stating that �the government is committed to so-and-so�.
We dare ask what the hospital administrators ever do with the colossal amount of monies that they receive from government both in form of subventions and from the National Health Insurance Scheme.
We know that some of these hospital administrators do �moonlighting� by working in the private hospitals. Do they not get ashamed when they go to the private hospitals and find water there, yet they cannot arrange for water for the government hospitals that they manage? Do people ever have a conscience or they are just callous.
Korle-Bu should be our flag-ship hospital. If those who manage it cannot be bothered to look after the place, they should be booted out and new managers found. Korle-Bu mangers are treating their patients as if they were animals. This is not fair and it should stop. We need water in Korle-Bu.
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