Fellow Ghanaians, it seems like you must first die before doctors will attend to you.

Описание: Fellow Ghanaians, there are tragedies that wound families, and then there are tragedies that indict an entire system, and what we have just witnessed is not merely the death of one man but the exposure of a healthcare structure that has normalized abandonment in the very moments when life hangs by the thinnest thread, because for close to three hours a critically injured Ghanaian lay in the custody of emergency responders who did everything within their limited power to preserve life, moving from one major public facility to another, pleading for intervention, explaining the severity of his condition, warning against further movement, and yet at each point the doors of care remained shut but literally because responsibility was refused.

According to the account provided, this victim of a hit and run situation, was transported first to a major facility, then to another, and eventually to Korle Bu Teaching Hospital, one of the most important referral centers in this country, and at each stop there was no admission, no emergency intervention, no assessment of vital signs, no immediate stabilization, not even the most basic clinical attention that a human being in distress is owed by law, by ethics, and by simple conscience, even when ambulance personnel offered to wait, even when they warned that further transportation posed grave danger, even when time itself had clearly become the enemy.

And when Korle Bu Teaching Hospital declined to take responsibility, the advice given was to continue transporting the patient to University of Ghana Medical Centre, as if the injured body in that ambulance was not a person whose life was slipping away minute by minute but a parcel to be redirected to another address, and so the ambulance crew, bound by duty and hope, continued to negotiate, continued to plead, continued to wait, and yet still no hospital staff attended to the casualty, no vital signs were taken, no emergency protocol was activated, no decisive act of care interrupted the steady march toward death.

Three hours is a long time when you are healthy and waiting in traffic, but it is an eternity when you are bleeding internally, struggling to breathe, slipping in and out of consciousness, and somewhere between one facility and another, that victim entered cardiac arrest, and the only people who attempted to rescue him were the emergency medical technicians in the ambulance who immediately initiated cardiopulmonary resuscitation, fighting with whatever tools and training they had against a collapse that should never have been allowed to progress so far without institutional intervention.
#JoyPrime