A Neurosurgeon at the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital Dr Hadi Abdallah has recounted the experience when he failed to secure a bed in his own ward when he fell sick and needed urgent treatment at the neurosurgery unit of the hospital.

Dr Abdallah said he had to be taken to a nurse’s office to be treated.

“Last week I was sick and you’ll be surprised that there was no bed for me. Last month I had an emergency while at work, I needed to be admitted to my own ward. You won’t believe it, there was no space for me.”

“They had to admit me into the nurses, the BDMS, her office, she had a bed there. That’s where they kept me,” he told Francis Abban on Morning Starr.

Dr Abdallah further narrated the ordeal his department has been facing saying “the neurosurgery ward is always full. And over the years, if you go to the accident center more than 50 percent of the beds there are being occupied by neurosurgery cases.”

“From brain injuries to spinal tumours. Some are waiting to have surgery done. If you go to most of the surgical wards we have few of our patients occupying the beds there.”

He went on “we work even up to the polyclinics because patients are being brought in and there’s no bed space for them. There’s nowhere for them to go.”

“Neurosurgery is a highly specialized area but also because of our accident cases and the rising cases in brain tumour that we have and spinal deformities and all the problems that arise from the degeneration of the spine, we are choked. And so it's almost like a funnel where you have so many cases at the bigger end of the funnel and then towards the apex, that is the ICU, that is the theatre.”

He maintained “so, once you do a case, instead of letting the patient stay there for a while once the patient looks okay, you have to move the patient, else there are other patients whose lives are at risk. If you don’t do the case, they are going to die.”

Dr Abbdalah said originally, the ICU is supposed to have six beds and then High Dependency Units “but we have an HDU which is empty because we don’t have critical care nurses. The ones we had have been sent to Trinidad and Togabo for economic reasons.”

He also stated that he was less perturbed about the backlash he may receive for highlighting the problems the hospital was facing “people don’t know what happened to me in the past. I almost lost my life in the early 2,000’s trying to make things better. I’ve been through a lot and I’m still talking. Because if I don’t talk it could be me. I’ve had reasons to believe that we have to keep talking.”