The Spokesperson of Fellows With Renal Conditions, Baffour Ahenkorah, has lamented the plight of kidney patients in the country following the recent back-and-forth over the cost of dialysis. Baffour Ahenkorah complained that the Renal Unit of the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital has since been shut to out-patients due to the uncertainties surrounding the cost.
Speaking on Ghana Tonight on TV3 on Tuesday, October 3, he said the silence of authorities including President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo is surprising to them. “Sometimes, I ask myself, do we even have leaders in this country at all? So, is the President, Vice President, Chief of Staff, Minister of Health, Ghana Health Service, they trying to say they’ve not heard our cry from last week Monday?” he wondered.
“Even they should come out and tell us something. Nobody has come out to say anything apart from what we heard from the Korle Bu CEO. “Do these people even care about us? Anyway, I am not God like I wish I could give all of them kidneys, severe kidneys, for them to see the kind of situation we go in. Some of us cannot urinate at all.”
This lament comes after a sudden U-turn by the Renal Unit of the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital on the upward review of the cost of dialysis. A notice was issued, announcing an increase in cost from GH¢380 to GH¢765.42.
However, the Chief Executive of the Hospital Dr Opoku Ware Ampomah later indicated that the notice was just a proposal and yet to be approved by Parliament. It was subsequently withdrawn even though some patients had already been forced to pay the new cost.
Mr Akenkorah said since the Korle Bu CEO came out, the Unit has been closed to out-patients and already 15 of them have died. He said most of them cannot afford treatment in private hospitals and consider Korle Bu’s services top-notch. “The kind of treatment Korle Bu gives us is top-notch,” he confessed to host Alfred Ocansey.
“The clearance is very good, and the water treatment is very good but please these are human lives, people are dying. They should open the unit to the OPD. People are dying.”
Baffour Ahenkorah appealed to well-meaning Ghanaians to add their voices. For him, if the government is not ready to open the Unit to them, then they should be given fatal injections. “If they will not open it, then please we are begging them, they should call all of us and then the Korle Bu CEO should instruct them to inject us so that all of us will die. They should kill all of us. That one will be fine rather than what they are doing.”
