The United States Ambassador to Ghana, Stephanie S. Sullivan, has urged Ghanaians to prioritise healthy lifestyles and pursue professional care when faced with medical situations.

According to her, the practice whereby people delay in seeking professional medical care does not promote the campaign on early detection and its attendant prevention.

Speaking to Ultimate News at the commissioning of the new Women’s Cancer Centre at the HopeXchange Medical Centre in Kumasi, the US Ambassador underscored how imperative it was for families and the nation as a whole to lead healthy lifestyles.

“I think you know when someone is facing a crisis, they want to seek all the help they can get, but if the professional medical help is the last help that they can seek, it may be too late so I think if people will change the order by which they seek medical attention, that would save a lot of lives including the lives of children.

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure and in all of our health partnerships with Ghana, we really try to emphasise on being positive, behavior change that will lead to good life; live it well, healthy families, healthy parents, healthy children and then to not really avoid seeking medical care”, she added.

The inauguration of the HopeXchange Women’s Cancer Centre is to augment the work of medical professionals in detecting earlier, cancer cases that female patients may present with, for cure, treatment and management.

According to figures from the Ghana Health Service, an average of 3,150 cervical cancer and 4,200 breast cancer cases were recorded alone in 2018 across the country.

The initiative is moreover to encourage community-based screening and promote research programmes which will monitor cancer prevalence in the Ashanti region

Ambassador Sullivan further acknowledged the efforts of the partners involved in bringing the project into fruition.

The Santasi-Apire based hospital serves as a modern specialist hospital, research centre and medical training facility.

The Centre is a unique broadly collaborative effort among the United States Government, Ghana’s Ministry of Health, Ghana Mission Foundation of Malta, the Catholic Church of Ghana, Yale University, HopeXchange Foundation, non-governmental organizations and some of the world’s foremost academic and medical institutions from around the globe.

“This is a very special public-private partnership and it brings in faith-based organizations, private hospitals, universities, so it is hard to calculate the level of financial input for training and that type of collaboration but the actual equipment and all is approximately of $1 million but that doesn’t begin to capture the amount of collaboration that we see here,” the ambassador noted.

The US Ambassador also drummed home the message of proper maintenance of the facility to benefit especially future generations or posterity.

Also speaking to the media, the HopeXchange President, Mario Cappello mentioned that: “Cervical cancer and breast cancer are the very killers of a woman. It doesn’t have to be like that because cervical cancer can be easily identified and also breast cancer be easily be diagnosed.”

“When it’s not diagnosed at an early stage, then very often it leads to very negative effects meaning deaths and through this Centre, we want to particularly to promote public health and also provide a possibility for people to come and do effective diagnosis”, Mr. Cappello hinted.

The HopeXchange Medical Centre can also now boast of a new Clinical Pathology Laboratory and Surgical Suite which were largely sponsored by the American people through the United States Agency for International Development.