Our history
Twenty-six years on one street
The centre opened in 1998 in a converted house with two consulting rooms. It is now eight departments across three floors, and it is still in the same building.
Meet the doctorsOur history
From a converted house to eight departments
Twenty-six years on the same street, which in a city that moves as fast as Accra is most of the point.
1998
Two consulting rooms and a bench
Dr Ben Osei-Bonsu takes the lease on a converted house on Nortei Ababio Loop and opens with one other doctor, a nurse and a laboratory bench in what had been the pantry. The first month sees eighty-one patients.
2003
The laboratory becomes a department
Full haematology and chemistry arrive, and with them the promise the centre still runs on: if we take the sample here, you get the answer here, and usually before you have gone home.
2007
The ward opens
Twenty beds on the first floor, and the centre stops being a clinic that sends people elsewhere at six in the evening. The emergency room opens the same year and has not closed since.
2011
Consultants start holding clinics
Cardiology first, then obstetrics and paediatrics. The idea was that a referral should mean a corridor rather than a month, and it is still the single thing patients mention most.
2016
Dr Comfort Nyarko takes over
Dr Osei-Bonsu retires after eighteen years. Dr Nyarko, who arrived as a house officer in 2004, becomes medical director and keeps two outpatient clinics a week — deliberately.
2024
The third floor, and digital records
Day surgery, physiotherapy and the eye clinic move upstairs, and every paper file in the building is scanned. Eighty-four people now work here, seeing about forty-one thousand visits a year.
“A hospital is not a building. It is whether the person at the desk remembers you, and whether the doctor has read the notes before you sit down. Everything else we bought later.”
Dr Ben Osei-Bonsu, founder
He said it at the opening of the ward in 2007 and it has been on the wall behind reception ever since. Twenty-six years, three floors and eighty-four members of staff later, it is still the thing every new clinician is told in their first week.
Dr Osei-Bonsu retired in 2016 and still comes in on Thursdays to sit in the waiting room and ask people how they got on. Nobody has yet found a polite way to stop him.
26
Years caring for Accra
84
Clinicians and staff
41
Thousand visits a year
8
Specialist departments
96
Per cent would recommend us
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