He said the Hospital had experienced some improvement in its health indicators for the first half of the year and that “Out-Patient Department  attendance improved by 13 per cent, admissions by eight per cent, in fact institutional mortality reduced from 4.9 to 4.5 per cent.”

He said maternal mortality reduced from 11 per cent to six per cent, still births reduced from 43 to 21, fresh still births reduced from 22 to 10, and admission death rate from newborns reduced from 9.2 per cent to 6.5 per cent.

Dr Atobrah said this when members of the Ghana Health Service Governing Council visited the facility as part of their two-day working visit to the Region to to identify best practices of some public health facilities.

He said the Hospital was one of the sites for the implementation of the Mother Baby Friendly Facility Initiative, a quality improvement programme sponsored by the UNICEF in Bangladesh, Uganda and Ghana.

Giving a brief history of the Hospital, the Medical Director said it was built in 1946 by the colonial masters and was currently the secondary referral centre for the Region with 220 beds.

He said it was implementing a telecommunication centre, which was a regional programme for strengthening referral services.  The Hospital is presently run by 600 staff; 490 are on government payroll and 154 on the Hospital’s payroll.

“We have seven doctors, mechanised local doctors on our payroll, we have two Cuban doctors who just joined us, one is a Physician Specialist and the other one is a Comprehensive Practitioner,” he said.

“For now we have sponsored four doctors for specialist programmes; one in Obstetrics and Gynaecology (O and G), two in Surgery, one Paediatrics, two in Family Health. There are other sponsorships and support,” he said.

Dr Atobrah said six nurses were undergoing training in anaesthesia, four for the residency programme in the Ghana College for Nurses and Midwives, three of whom had completed and had joined them, adding that there were two undergoing training in Critical Care Nursing, two in Emergency Nursing who would soon join them to strengthen their services.

He said the Hospital’s bed occupancy, at the end of the first half of the year, was 77 per cent and explained that occupancy rate was 242 per cent and 143 per cent at the newborn care and maternity units respectively.

He said work on the third phase of the 177-bed facility, which was about 99 per cent complete, had come to a standstill for the past one year.