Who will see you
Fourteen doctors, sixty-one nurses, one building
Most of them live within a few streets of here. That is not a coincidence: a hospital staffed by people from the town it serves is a hospital where somebody on the ward already knows your family.
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Dr. Dzifa Ahiable
Medical Director
Family medicine. Came back from Korle Bu in 2011 to run the outpatient department and never left it.
Dr. Akpene Bansah
Consultant physician
Hypertension, diabetes and the long conditions. Runs the Thursday chronic disease clinic.
Dr. Senyo Agbeko
Consultant surgeon
General and orthopaedic lists. Twenty-two years of theatre, eleven of them here.
Dr. Yayra Nyavor
Paediatrician
The children's ward and the Tuesday welfare clinic. Known to every mother in Bankoe.
Mawunyo Tettey
Matron, nursing services
Sixty-one nurses report to her. So, in practice, does everybody else.
Sena Amenyo
Senior midwife
Has delivered more than four thousand babies in this building, and remembers a startling number of them.
Who is here at three in the morning
The rota, written down
Every hospital says it is open. This is what that actually means here, unit by unit — and it is the same on a Sunday and over Christmas.
Emergency
A doctor on site, every hour
Never on call from home. There is always somebody awake in the building.
Theatre
Surgeon and anaesthetist on call, 24 hours
Thirty minutes from the telephone to the table, most nights.
Maternity
Midwife-led, obstetrician on call
Two midwives on every shift, three on Friday and Saturday nights.
Paediatrics
Registrar overnight, consultant from 7am
Dr. Nyavor takes calls from the ward through the night regardless.
Laboratory
Staffed to 10pm, on call after
Emergency bloods and cross-matching at any hour.
My mother was admitted on a Sunday night and the doctor who saw her at midnight was the same one who discharged her on Thursday. Nobody made us feel like we were interrupting.
Comfort Adzo Mensah
Ho Bankoe
There is a bed, and there is a doctor
Outpatients runs Monday to Saturday, 7am to 7pm. Emergency is open every hour of every day — including the ones nobody plans for.
Vale