Management of the Eastern Regional Hospital in Koforidua has raised concerns about the rate at which patients and their relatives who are yet to settle their service debts are absconding from the facility.
According to the management, patients and their relatives who often arrange with management to have an undertaking to enable them to defer the settlement of their debt do not fulfill their part of the bargain and often abscond from the hospital unceremoniously.
Briefing the media on this disturbing development, the Medical Superintendent of the regional hospital, Dr. Arko Akoto Ampaw, said the development is affecting the finances and operation of the facility.
"We are contacting the medical social workers unit so that they can be evaluated to see whether they can pay or not." And whether they want to have an undertaking to defer payments to another date, they don’t do that. "And patients just disappear from the wards without paying their bills, and it’s causing a lot of loss to the hospital," he bemoaned.
He said management is working around the clock to ensure that security at the hospital is tightened.
“Security around the hospital is also a contributing factor; we hope to tighten security so that such things are minimized,” Dr. Ampaw said.
He also called on the general public, which has yet to come for the remains of the relatives at the mortuary, to do so in order to help the hospital decongest the morgue.
“The hospital's own capacity to contain the population is beginning to decrease." In most cases, our mortuaries are quite full, and it may also be that people are not burying early. We would have wished that the population would take note of that. so that they can take their bodies and bury them early to make spaces available. "In any case, management is expanding that area in the future,” the Medical Superintendent of the hospital stated.
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