Former President John Mahama has said he will end the no-bed syndrome in his second coming. The flag bearer of the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) told Ghanaians in a Facebook Live transmission on Monday, 23 December 2019 that his next government intends to continue the works he started during his last administration in opening up the health sector, by building more hospitals with more beds and employing more nurses, doctors and paramedics.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we did is to expand access to healthcare by building new hospitals. You cannot employ nurses when you don\u2019t have anywhere to post them. And that\u2019s why we started all the district hospitals. And our policy, when we launched our manifesto, is that there would be a modern health facility in every district of this country depending on the population size of the district.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt can be a health centre, it can be a polyclinic, it can be a district hospital, and then, I already announced that in the six new regions, we are going to build six new regional hospitals.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re also going to open the University of Ghana Medical Centre, and operationlise it\u201d, Mr Mahama promised.
\nAll these, he said, \u201cwill lead to the employment of more nurses and doctors\u201d.<\/p>\n
He added: \u201cWe\u2019re going to start Phase II of the Ridge Hospital project so that we can have more beds\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe want to end the no-bed syndrome\u201d, Mr Mahama noted, decrying: \u201cWe shouldn\u2019t have an emergency where you go to any hospital and they say that: \u2018We don\u2019t have beds, take the patient away\u2019. Or even if they are forced to admit them, they go bring plastic chairs and put patients in them with the drip by their side. It is not the Ghana of the 21st Century\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd, so, we\u2019re going to expand the healthcare sector so that we can bring in more nurses and paramedics. We\u2019ll fully operationalise the Wa Regional Hospital. The programme that we had before we left office, we were introducing 6,000 new hospital beds and if every hospital bed requires three paramedics, that\u2019s 6,000 x 3; you can imagine how many people we could have employed\u201d.<\/p>\n
Mr Mahama also questioned the Akufo-Addo government\u2019s claim that it had employed 50,000 nurses since coming into office three years ago.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe government said they\u2019ve employed 50,000 nurses since they came and still nurses are picketing and demonstrating. I mean, it just shows that it\u2019s not true. Recently, we were told by the Nurses and Midwives Council or whichever body it is that the total number of nurses in Ghana does not exceed 70,000, so, how could you have employed 50,000 nurses? So, that\u2019s a fallacy\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Former President John Mahama has said he will end the no-bed syndrome in his second coming. The flag bearer of the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) told Ghanaians in a Facebook Live transmission on Monday, 23 December 2019 that his next government intends to continue the works he started during his last administration in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":66,"featured_media":7730,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,7,8,12],"tags":[1906,4937],"class_list":["post-7729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-all-news","category-head-lines","category-homepage-english","category-policy","tag-former-president-john-mahama","tag-ill-end-no-bed-syndrome"],"yoast_head":"\n