Let Us Acquire the Tamale Teaching Hospital an MRI

Editorial (Daily Searchlight of Tuesday,, 28th June, 2022)

The Tamale Teaching Hospital (TTH) lacks a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging scanner (MRI), a situation, which is affecting health care delivery. 

     Mr Emmanuel Donkor, Director of Administration of TTH, who announced this, said, “According to experts, the MRI we have now is out of date and it is better to replace it.” 

     He was speaking at a meeting with Members of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Health, who visited the facility in Tamale to learn about its operations and challenges.  

     Mr Donkor mentioned other challenges facing the hospital, which included high residential accommodation fees, inadequate water supply and delays in payment of health insurance claims aside from the fact that health insurance charges were not competitive. 

     Mr Kwabena Mintah Akandoh, the Ranking Member on the Parliamentary Select Committee on Health, said it was heartbreaking to know that the TTH did not have MRI, adding “It is unpardonable for a teaching hospital not to have MRI because it is a basic requirement of every teaching hospital.” 

The Daily Searchlight agrees that it is heartbreaking that the hospital lacks such a basic facility. We also believe that the practice of institutions, particularly state-owned facilities having to order requisitions and supplies from a central point in Accra, in these day and age where Ghana’s population is over thirty million souls, is frankly unhealthy.

The centralized procurement system we have in Ghana is militating against development, particular at the grassroots.

We wonder, for instance, if this hospital has departmental heads, a procurement office, a chief executive and a board.

If all these officers are in place, then we think that it is unwieldy for the hospital to be looking over its shoulders at what some official in Accra would decide, before basic equipment can be supplied. Indeed, it seems that all procuremets must be ordered and sanctioned from Accra, which leads to the ridiculous situation that even small buildings have to be commissioned by some official from Accra at great cost.

If we believe that we have a problem with corruption, which is most likely, then we should make it mandatory that all procurement practices, parameters and prices in the public sector be published even before audits, so that members of the public and the press can help in the fight to accountability.

It is heartbreaking, that it would take a visit by a parliamentary group to bring such simple things to light.

(This article was first published in the column EDITORIAL of the Daily Searchlight of Tuesday,, 28th June, 2022. The Daily Searchlight appears on the newsstands of Ghana every working day and PDF versions are available for sale online twenty-four hours a day all day throughout the world on www.ghananewsstand.com).