Posted: Daily Guide |Tuesday, 17 August 2010
By Charles Takyi-Boadu
IN HIS bid to mount a face-saving campaign about ongoing developments at the nation’s premier hospital, the Board Chairman of the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital (KBTH), Professor Andrews Seth Ayettey, has ended up indicting the hospital’s central laboratory of allegedly producing unreliable test results.
In a rejoinder to a DAILY GUIDE publication dated August 11, 2010 under the headline “Mills’ man wife causes confusion at Korle Bu”, Prof. Ayettey indicated that “the laboratories had had problems such as frequent breakdowns in equipment, shortage of reagents, unreliable test results, absence of weekend and night duties, complaints of poor services by patients etc.”
According to him, before the Board which he chairs was inaugurated, the management of the hospital had in November 2008 set up a committee chaired by Prof. J.K Acquaye of the Department of Hematology to review the structure and function of the laboratories to improve effectiveness and efficiency.
The committee submitted a report and “based on this report, the CEO, Professor Nii Otu Nartey, recommended to the Board the appointment of Prof. Mercy Newman as head of the laboratory Sub-BMC to oversee the laboratories and to implement the recommendations of the Acquaye committee,” professor Ayettey said, adding “the Board unanimously accepted this recommendation.”
This was what eventually led to the removal and replacement of the head of the Laboratory Sub-Budget Management Centre (BMC), S. Y Oppong with Prof. Newman, wife of John Martey Newman, Chief of Staff of the Mills administration.
However, the laboratory manager, Augustine Sagoe and the former head of the laboratory Sub-BMC, S.Y Oppong, have categorically denied the Board Chairman’s claim that the laboratory had been churning out “unreliable test results”, describing his claim as erroneous.
In separate interviews with DAILY GUIDE, they noted that as a human institution, their test results cannot always be hundred percent correct.
That notwithstanding, they noted that the margin of error could therefore not be anything of greater proportion as the Acquaye committee claimed and therefore noted that if anything at all, it would be the barest minimum since according to him, the lab is among the best or the best in the West African sub region.
As a retired professor on contract at the College of Health Sciences of the University of Ghana, and having served as head of department of Microbiology for a number of years, the Board Chairman said Professor Newman was best suited for the job, stressing that in making such appointments, the hospital prefers faculty of a professorial rank in order not to hinder the academic progress of younger staff.
He therefore noted that “the value of people like Professor Newman to the hospital cannot be measured” since according to him, “such individuals bring to the hospital their wealth of experience as academics, researchers and managers, at little cost to the hospital.”
That notwithstanding, Prof. Ayettey noted that the position to which Prof. Newman was appointed is not a full time and salaried one.