The ambulance, which is worth 232,320.00 Ghana Cedis, is to improve health care delivery within the Tema region and end the dependence on non-emergency vehicles from being used to convey patients in critical conditions.

In an address, during the presentation, the Board Chairman of Tema Lube Oil, Mr. Kow Abaka Quansah, observed that “the absence of an ambulance in such a facility is not good and might have led to needless deaths. For this reason, Tema Lube Oil decided to present this facility to make the hospital more efficient.”

He said, “As a socially responsible company, we have over the years donated various items to organizations, institutions and communities in the country, especially within our immediate environs, which include: Tema Polyclinic, Tema Library, Tema Municipal Authority (TMA), Tema Regional Police Command, Tema Manheam Community School and E&T Department of Korle bu Teaching Hospital and the Ghana Heart Foundation, just to mention a few.”

Mr. Quansah said that, as part of the package, Tema Lube Oil would pay insurance on the ambulance for one year and also take care of maintenance of the vehicle over the said period.

He said, “The Company is able to do these things and might do more if there is greater patronage of our products, namely the high quality and competitively priced lubricants that we blend locally for the Oil Marketing Companies in Ghana and mostly sold at Fuel Filling stations throughout the country.”

The Managing Director of Tema Lube Oil Company Limited, Mr. Amos Donkoh, recounted some of the gestures Tema Lube Oil had made to the hospital by saying, “We’ve donated a patient monitoring machine to them before; we’ve also given them a lifesaving machine. We’ve actually donated an ambulance to them before, but that has been scraped off, that’s why we are bringing this one to them.”

Mr. Donkoh said, “Lube Oil shouldn’t keep all the profit it makes alone; the community should also benefit to complete the relevance of Tema Lube Oil to the Ghanaian society.”He asked other corporate organizations to emulate the example of Tema Lube Oil and reach out to sections of society that needed help in order to shoulder some of the burdens on government and make people’s lives better.

He added that, “Very soon we’ll be making a donation of a police booth to the TMA. So we’re currently constructing a police booth at the Timber Market area to enhance security in the system. That’s what we’ll be doing; that should happen in the next three months.”

He said Tema Lube Oil remained committed to providing assistance to individuals and organizations in the areas of health, sanitation, education and security.  Receiving the donation, the Medical Director of Tema General Hospital, Dr. Kwabena Edusei-Poku, promised to put the facility to good use to justify the efforts of Tema Lube Oil.

He informed of how determined he was to ensure the vehicle was fully functional at all times to serve the purpose for which it was donated.  Dr. Edusei-Poku observed the need for an institutional ambulance system by saying, “The national ambulance has challenges and difficulties, and so we feel that the bigger hospitals should run their own ambulance system instead, and this is where Tema Lube Oil comes in handy.”

He observed that it was difficult for patients to move around when there were no ambulances and had to resort to taxis which posed challenges in conveying patients and sometimes led to fatalities.