Where this came from
It began because somebody was tired of sending women to Accra
Every step below was an answer to something that had gone badly the year before. That is not a modest way of describing a strategy — it is genuinely how this hospital was built.
How it happened
Twenty-six years, one street
Nothing on this list was planned more than a year ahead. Each of them was the answer to something that had gone wrong for somebody the year before.
1998
Six beds behind the Civic Centre
Mercy Kudjordji, a midwife with twenty years at the government hospital, rented two rooms and started delivering babies in them. Forty-one in the first year.
2003
The first theatre
A single operating room, built to do caesareans without sending women down the Accra road at midnight. It is still in use, and it is still called the old theatre.
2009
Our own laboratory
Before this, every blood sample went to Accra and every result came back four days later. The day the analyser arrived is the day this became a hospital rather than a clinic.
2014
The children's ward
Fourteen beds, and a rule written into the plans: a bed beside every cot, because a parent sleeping in a corridor chair is not a detail.
2019
Physiotherapy and rehabilitation
A proper gym rather than a corner of a ward, opened after a stroke patient spent nine months travelling to Accra twice a week for something we should have been doing here.
2024
Seventy-four beds
The new wing took the hospital past seventy beds for the first time, and took the emergency department off the corridor it had occupied for eleven years.
74
Beds
Across general, maternity and paediatric wards.
118
People on the payroll
Fourteen doctors, sixty-one nurses and midwives.
1240
Babies a year
Roughly a hundred a month, and three on a busy night.
26
Years on this street
The address has not changed since 1998.
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