The Chief Executive Officer, Prosper Akanboung, and the entire management of the Tamale Teaching Hospital have been commended by the Concerned Medical Laboratory Scientists (COMELS), for rescinding its decision to privatize the hospital’s laboratory department.
COMELS, a group of medical laboratory scientists, together with the Patients Safety Advocacy Africa, condemned attempts by authorities of the Hospital to privatize the Hospital’s laboratory department.
According to the group, the decision was not only going to hamper the training of laboratory scientists in the Teaching Hospital, but was also going to increase the cost of accessing lab services, and overburden poor Ghanaians particularly in the three regions of the north.
The laboratory scientists say their colleagues in the public labs are equally competent and can work to full capacity with the required machinery and motivation. This was after laboratory scientists at the hospital gave management an ultimatum to rescind the decision or face their wrath.
The Management of the Hospital eventually aborted the plan. Whiles commending the authorities for the decision to terminate the plan, COMELS reminded the need for serious attention to be given to public laboratories nationwide to become more effective.
Click to read full statement
THANK YOU TTH MANAGEMNT AND QUALITY ASSURACE COMMITTE
We are pleased with the commitment and assurance given by the management of the Tamale Teaching Hospital (TTH); to put on hold the planned privatization of the hospital’s laboratory department after days of protests and agitations from the hospital’s laboratory staff as well as groups and individuals who believe laboratory services are a backbone of quality public health delivery.
We are enthused by interventions from numerous outfits when the news first broke. We appreciate the humility and honesty with which the CEO Prosper Akanboung, and management have realized they were about to commit one of the worst management errors in the health fraternity.
Despite their earlier threat to go ahead with the plan, they have shown they are committed to being a management that is prepared to listen.
This was a policy which could have crippled medical laboratory service delivery in the northern region, impede the training of health professionals’ especially Medical laboratory scientists and placed a huge burden on the poor patient.
As we commend the management of the Tamale Teaching Hospital for seeing the sense in our call and the numerous cries from other individuals, we wish to state that we stand by our position that there is the need for reforms in the medical laboratory practice in this country.
Effective and efficient laboratory practice can never be achieved if we undermine the requirements that will help laboratories achieve their core mandate of producing quality, affordable and accessible test results.
In modern medical practice, the laboratory is considered a core team member in effective health delivery and must be well integrated in both technical and managerial policies.
When we talk of laboratory practice, we are talking of quality with care. We are talking of evidence based medicine, personalized medicine and effective diagnosis and treatment.
Laboratory practice is no more adding some chemicals to sample (stool, blood etc) to get results as well known. It is technical, it is scientific, it is complex, it is sophisticated and it is knowledge intensive practice and has to be treated as such.
We are ever ready to help and guide policy makers to make the right policies for laboratory practice. We are ever ready to provide technical and managerial support to any hospital, laboratory or health centre that wants to provide effective and efficient health delivery that will protect the patient in Ghana and beyond.
The patient continues to be our hope, they deserve better and their welfare must be supreme. We would wish to reiterate that hospitals’ management should do well to unitize medical laboratories within their facilities. We bemoan the manner in which medical laboratories are just viewed as accessory units across hospitals in the country.
It is globally acknowledged that medical laboratories are fully fledged departments with units/sub-departments such as hematology, microbiology, histology, clinical chemistry and molecular units just to mention a few.
Our country however, has failed to empower our laboratories to become independent department manned by qualified professionals in the sector. There is still no directorate for this all important service delivery even at the Ministry level.
This has left us with situations where people without inadequate laboratory knowledge procure wrong, expired or low standard reagents and laboratory equipment which largely leads to misdiagnosis.
It is our hope that the TTH brouhaha would ignite a debate on the need to have hospital laboratories empowered and manned by professionals with the requisite knowledge rather than the current situation of adjunct professionals superintending over what they have inadequate knowledge in.
We call on various media organizations and civil societies to champion this course. It is our hope that the coming few years would see a much more improvement in all sectors of health delivery.
Thank you.
Writers:
Kyeremeh Evans (MLS) Leading Member, COMELS. President and Co-founder, PSA2 mr.evanskyeremeh@gmail.com
Maxwell Akonde (MLS) Leading Member, COMELS
akondemaxwell@gmail.com
Alfred Tetteh (MLT) Member, COMELS, Chairman of the Heath Workers Union, Brong Ahafo chapter and Co-founder of Passion Medical Relief. alfredtetteh70@yahoo.com
