Health Committee Chair questions Kasoa ‘no bed’ claim
The Chairman of Parliament’s Health Committee is demanding answers after a pregnant woman died at the Kasoa Mother and Child Hospital under circumstances he says do not add up.
Abigail Opoku passed away on Sunday, April 26, with accounts suggesting she could not receive a caesarean section because the hospital’s recovery ward had no available beds. For Dr. Mark Kurt Nawaane, Chairman of Parliament’s Health Committee and a doctor with more than thirty years of practice, that explanation raises more questions than it answers.
“This type of story does not add up and it is not the typical no bed syndrome case that we usually speak about,” he told Joy FM’s Midday News on Thursday.
Dr. Nawaane zeroed in on a glaring inconsistency, Opoku had been referred from another facility and admitted to the hospital already in labour. If there were no beds, he questioned, how was she admitted in the first place? “How did you admit the patient without a bed? Or was it that she was asked to go to another facility and she did not go?”
He went further, noting that beyond the bed question, protocol alone should have ensured she received proper attention. Referred labour cases, he said, require both midwifery and physician care, and where no doctor is available, immediate re-referral is the expected course of action. He also challenged the recovery bed claim on practical grounds, pointing out that caesarean patients are routinely returned to their original beds after surgery, undermining the hospital’s stated reason for withholding the procedure.
Regulatory bodies including the Ghana Health Service, the Medical and Dental Council, and the Nursing and Midwifery Council must now step in, he insisted, with findings delivered within days. “We need the truth. What we have heard so far does not add up.”
The Central Regional Directorate of the Ghana Health Service has confirmed an investigation is already underway.
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