President of the Ghana Registered Nurses and Midwives Association (GRNMA), Perpetual Ofori-Ampofo, has said that hospitals and other health facilities should not experience power outages. She explained that power outages in health facilities are likely to cause deaths of patients and hence should not happen.
“It is a problem we are all experiencing but to have facilities such as hospitals have power outages to the extent that it causes the loss of life is something that should never happen,” she said on the Hot Issue with Keminni Amanor on TV3 Sunday, March 31.
She was speaking in relation to the situation where a nursing mother lost her three-day-old baby at the Tema General Hospital on Tuesday, March 26, 2024, allegedly due to a power outage at the facility.
Rashida Abubakar Tetteh, the 24-year-old troubled mother has disclosed that she was on admission at the Post C-S ward of the hospital when she was told by a doctor that the son couldn’t survive due to the non-functional medical equipment during the power outage.
“I went to visit my son, but I didn’t see him. I was waiting outside when one doctor came to inform me that they were sorry, but due to the lights out, my child could not survive because the incubator was not working.
The lights went off on Tuesday evening. No staff has spoken to me, and they haven’t said anything to me’ she narrated.
The grandmother of the deceased baby, Rebecca Johnson, also expressed grief over the development. It’s painful, they have killed my child because of dumsor; I am in pain. We have nothing to say to the hospital. A hospital like Tema General said they didn’t have petrol in the generator. Is this how we are going to act in this country,” she cried.
The Tema General Hospital however denied reports suggesting that the Tuesday outages caused the fatalities at the facility. In a press release issued on Wednesday, March 27, the hospital dismissed these claims as baseless and urged the public to disregard them. “It is worth noting that no lives were lost as a result of this power outage,” an excerpt of the statement said.
The statement emphasised the hospital’s unwavering commitment to prioritizing the health and safety of its patients above all else. “The Tema General Hospital assures the general public that the Facility will continue to put the health and safety of its patients at the core of its business,” the statement concluded.
By: Laud Nartey
