The statistics of kids requiring specialist and therefore expensive surgical interventions is not available to us. Given the frequency of publications soliciting support for these persons, there is no doubt in our minds that the figure is high and still counting.
From hole-in-heart to tumour ailments, we continue to receive requests for support from members of the public for the expensive procedures.
The distressed mothers clutching letters from the National Cardio-Thoracic Centre have disturbing stories to tell about their difficult times. Fathers are hardly seen under the circumstances and we wonder why it is only the mothers who lead the search for support.
While some lucky ones eventually get the needed support, the stories of others just die off – information about whether they survived it or not, never reaching us. Some positive stories do come to us however, when after successful surgeries mothers return to express gratitude to their benefactors through us.
Here is to ask that as a nation, we should begin seeking alternative means of addressing such medical conditions. We cannot continue watching children die for want of funds to have them access medical interventions in a country where profligacy of political office holders has cost us so much.
There should be ways of addressing these if we join hands to find out how. It took the former President John Agyekum Kufuor and others to arrive at an option for addressing our medical challenges.
The national insurance scheme when it was mooted as an idea, suffered incessant condemnation as an unviable suggestion – unfeasible. That it took off and still being accessed even after a near-moribund situation under the previous political administration, suggests that solutions abound for all circumstances.
We are therefore asking that the authorities find ways of addressing the special medical needs of children. Their mothers, under the circumstances, watch their children die because of lack of financial support for surgical procedures to be undertaken.
If we are taxed for non-functioning streetlights, we could look at the possibility of raising funds for these young ones whose stories are too pathetic to let go without adequate attention. Corporate entities could be engaged with a view to having them contribute towards a special fund to take care of such kids.
Considering their plights separately and treating them as such, could lead us to the promise land. Today, a company engaged in the supply of medical and surgical equipment, Trans-SAS Trading and Manufacturing Limited, had made a donation of a thousand Ghana Cedis towards the surgery of a kid with a tumour. There are others whose stories are yet to make it on the pages of the DAILY GUIDE and indeed other media channels.
We especially entreat the state authorities to lead the way as they did with the national health insurance scheme project.