•The University of Ghana Medical Centre, according to Dr Hadi Mohammed Abdullah, is a replica of the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital

• indicated that the politics associated with the implementation of UGMC did not help

• Dr. Abdullah believes Ghana should focus on building more excellence centres rather than just duplicating the likes of some big hospitals in the country

Dr Hadi Mohammed Abdullah has described the University of Ghana Medical Centre (UGMC) as a beautiful edifice but how successive governments have implemented the opening of the medical centre has been poor.

“I thought the idea behind it was super but the implementation, the way we allowed politics to come in between us in such a beautiful structure, I was shocked,” the Neurosurgeon told Nana Aba Anamoah on Starr Chat.

Dr Abdullah said he would have thought that the funding for the UGMC would have built some centres for excellence in the country that can be able to pay the loan faster.

“Having known the problems with Korle Bu Teaching Hospital, I would have thought the UGMC, the funding that we had could have been used to build some of these centres of excellence.

“UGMC is basically a replica of Korle Bu Teaching Hospital and for me, to some extent, it was some lack of understanding of our programmes. The intentions were good but there was some lack of understanding,” he stated.

He continued: “You can’t keep building Korle Bu all around, in the end, you’ll still have this no bed syndrome but when you have the centres of excellence, for instance, neuro will have its own CT scan, MRI machines, etc.

“We built UGMC without having a Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scan for instance as a country. As a country, we do not have a proper oncology centre. Of course, we have the radiotherapy and radio oncology centre at Korle Bu but we should have cancer properly built centre with admission beds there for these patients.

“Currently, the system we operate, the patients go and come; it is sad!” he stressed.

Dr Abdullah stated that anytime he speaks about these basic things in the hospitals, he is being told, we don’t need it.

“Nobody has sat down to quantify the amount of money we spend sending these patients aboard [for a treatment they can have in Ghana]. Having done all these and built UGMC, it is not functioning to the level that we had expected it to be. So I think we need to reorient ourselves,” he noted.

Dr Abdullah appealed to the government that the second phase of the UGMC should look at building some excellence centres and “I can assure you that UGMC looking at the structure may not be able to pay for itself the way we want to operate it like Korle Bu but if you built these centres of excellence, they will be able to pay back the money because these services [like the neuro services] are not even available in West Africa, meanwhile, we have the doctors.”

“UGMC has not helped us, probably the politics have not helped us but it is the setup and right from the beginning, we got it wrong,” he said.