Ghana to establish national command centre for real-time emergency patient redirection
Ghana is working to set up a national command centre that will allow doctors to sort and redirect emergency patients to hospitals with available beds in real time, according to the board chairman of the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital, Prof. Titus Beyuo. Prof. Beyuo disclosed the plan this week amid renewed public concern over overcrowding at Korle Bu. He said the command centre forms a key part of a broader emergency patient management system the government is trying to operationalise to ease pressure on major referral facilities.
Prof. Beyuo said, "We need the ambulance service to relocate their call centre to this national command centre. We need to get physicians and other people at the command centre who will do an online sorting of patients and redirect them." Under the new system, ambulance teams will no longer send patients automatically to Korle Bu or Komfo Anokye without knowing whether beds are available. Prof. Beyuo said every one of Ghana's 200-plus ambulances must be connected to the platform before it can work a nationwide deployment effectively, which he said is still in progress.
No timeline was given for when the centre will go live. Prof. Beyuo cautioned that the complexity of the infrastructure involving personnel, training, communication networks, and inter-agency coordination makes it difficult to commit to a firm date.
Quick Summary
Ghana is planning a national command centre to manage emergency patient flow. The goal is to ease pressure on major hospitals- but its success depends on a complex network.
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