Fellow Ghanaians, there is a particular kind of cruelty in being sick. You are already vulnerable, already frightened, already at the mercy of a body that has stopped cooperating with you, and all you want, all any human being in that condition wants, is to be taken somewhere safe, somewhere clean, somewhere staffed with people who have the tools and the resources to help you fight your way back. That is the basic, minimum expectation of a hospital. It’s not about luxury. Just a bit of excellence. Just the basic, fundamental assurance that the place you have been brought to is better equipped to save your life than the floor of your own home.
Fellow Ghanaians, we are not meeting that standard. We are not even close to meeting that standard. In our major public hospitals, patients are lying on floors. Not in some rural clinic at the end of a dirt road with no government attention and no infrastructure. In our major hospitals. In the facilities that are supposed to represent the best of what public healthcare in this country can offer, human beings who are sick and scared and in pain are being placed on the floor because there is no bed available to receive them. Let that image sit with you and do not let it go until it makes you angry, because it should make you very, very angry.
Fellow Ghanaians, and then consider Korle Bu Teaching Hospital. The flagship. The place whose name is supposed to carry with it the weight of medical authority and the reassurance of serious healthcare. Drive past it. Walk through it. Look at the buildings, look at the paint peeling off the walls, look at the infrastructure that has been neglected and patched and neglected again across decades of governments that found money for everything except the fundamentals. You do not feel confident when you are wheeled through those gates. You feel dread. You feel the particular sinking feeling of a person who is realising that the place that is supposed to save them looks like it has itself been waiting to be saved for a very long time. That is a building that compounds your fear.
Fellow Ghanaians, a few weeks ago a man was hit by a vehicle and left on the road, and the people who came to his aid did what they were supposed to do and loaded him into an ambulance and drove him to a hospital, and that hospital turned him away, and they drove him to another hospital, and that hospital turned him away, and they drove him to another, and he died in the ambulance while the hospitals of this country conducted their bureaucratic debate about whose responsibility he was. He died not because medicine could not save him. He died because the system that was supposed to organise medicine on his behalf failed him completely and without apology. That man had a name. That man had a family. And the manner of his death is a direct indictment of the choices this country has made about what it values and what it does not.
Fellow Ghanaians, the government’s directive that no public hospital should turn away a patient on the grounds that there are no beds available is the right directive and it is long overdue. But a directive without resources is just words on paper moving through a broken system and changing very little for the person lying on the floor. You cannot instruct a hospital to have beds it does not have. You cannot mandate your way to functional equipment, to adequate staffing, to buildings that do not look like they have been surrendered to time and indifference. The directive must be the beginning of a serious, sustained, properly funded retooling of every major public health facility in this country, or it will be remembered as another announcement that made headlines for a week and then dissolved quietly into the long list of things we said and did not do.
Fellow Ghanaians, this country is not poor. Let us be honest about that. We spend money. We spend enormous amounts of money on things that are difficult to justify when patients are sleeping on hospital floors. We spend on convoys and travel and per diems and allowances and the endless machinery of political comfort. We find money when the political class decides that something matters enough to fund. And the political class has, for a very long time, decided that public healthcare does not matter enough, because the political class does not use public healthcare. The moment a minister or a member of parliament or a government appointee feels unwell, they are on the next available flight to London or Accra’s private facilities, and the chaos and the filth and the inadequacy of our public hospitals become an abstraction to them, a problem they know exists but do not personally have to navigate.
Fellow Ghanaians, but I want to say something to those leaders. There is a category of sickness that does not give you time to pack a bag and book a flight. There is a category of medical emergency that finds you wherever you are and demands an immediate response from whatever system is closest to you. A stroke does not wait for your passport. A cardiac arrest does not pause while your aide arranges travel. A serious accident on a Friday evening does not check your health insurance before it happens to you. And when that moment comes, as it has come for powerful people before and as it will come for powerful people again, you will be wheeled into the same hospitals that the rest of us have been trying to survive in, and you will discover, at the worst possible moment, exactly what it feels like to be at the mercy of a system you chose not to fix when you had the power and the resources to fix it.
Fellow Ghanaians, the time to act is now. Not the next budget cycle. Not the next government. Not after the next election, when promises are being made and crowds are being warmed, and everyone remembers briefly that ordinary Ghanaians exist and suffer and deserve better. Now. An aggressive, honest, properly resourced retooling of our public health infrastructure, the buildings, the equipment, the staffing, the dignity of the spaces where sick people go to recover, must become a national priority of the same urgency we would attach to anything else we actually care about as a country. Because the measure of how much a society cares about its people is not in its speeches. It is in its hospitals.
Fellow Ghanaians, we must act like we care. Because right now, the floors of our hospitals are telling a very different story.
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