President Akufo-Addo has cut the sod for the reactivation of work for the construction of the forty-four (44) year old Maternity and Children’s Block of the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital.
The project, which is being funded by German Bank, Deutsche Bank, will cost €155 million and is expected to be completed within 36 months, with the construction being undertaken by the Contract.
Once completed in 36 months, President Akufo-Addo stated that the Maternity and Children’s Block will be a state-of-the-art, modern health edifice, with pediatrics, gynecology and obstetrics units.
It will serve as a referral center for twelve (12) of the sixteen (16) regions of our country. It will be a seven hundred and fifty (750)-bed building, with outpatient areas for adults and children, and it will have ten (10) operating theatres and diagnostic rooms, fully equipped with X-Ray, ultrasound, and mammography facilities.
It will also house an intensive care unit, a high dependency unit, isolation rooms, and student lecture halls, with the capacity to provide catering services for staff, patients, and students.
Recounting the sequence of events leading up to the reactivation of construction work of the Block, President Akufo-Addo noted that, in 2017, his first year as President of the Republic, he paid a 3-day working visit to the Ashanti Region, where his itinerary took him to the abandoned Maternity and Children’s Block.
The project began in 1976, as part of the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital Expansion Project, but came to a standstill in 1979. It was reactivated in 1999, under the administration of the 1st President of the 4th Republic, His Excellency Jerry John Rawlings, but again stalled shortly afterward.
In 2004, the administration of the 2nd President of the 4th Republic, His Excellency John Agyekum Kufuor, took it up, but, soon after he departed from office in January 2009, work on this project was discontinued, until the assumption of office of another NPP administration, the Akufo-Addo government, in 2017.
Source: Mybrytfmonline/Kofi Atakora
