A few days have elapsed since the unfortunate and avoidable death of a 16-year-old girl was reported to have occurred at the hands of some staff of the Tamale Teaching Hospital (TTH).
She was said to have died because her parents could not pay a processing fee of GH¢108 so she could be given a life-saving blood transfusion.
To date, we have not heard from the end of the hospital’s administration regarding what measures have been taken to investigate the authenticity of the matter. The only response came in the form of the CEO of the institution saying the matter is yet to come to him.
It is interesting and unacceptable that an occurrence of this magnitude is yet to come to his notice some days after its occurrence. An unavoidable death, natural as it is, should not make the headline, not so when the irresponsibility or the hard-heartedness of some hospital staff was responsible for it.
We have heard from the side of the bereaved family not so from the hospital administration. The management of the hospital should let us, the people of Ghana, know how safe patients are in their hands especially when during emergency they have no money. Would they be allowed to die or be treated?
Even under war situations, there are international conventions which demand that enemy combatants are treated and accorded the dignity a human being deserves.
The matter under review is about the parents making an earlier substantial payment only to be told that the outstanding balance be paid lest transfusion was going to be denied and indeed and sadly so it was.
It was only when the girl showed signs of yielding of the ghost that they changed their minds but it was too late to save her life. She was gone and we wonder whether the wicked staff regretted their inactions.
The anomaly would have still been a reprehensible one even in a private facility as much as it is in a public institution; it is in this vein that we condemn in its entirety the act of inhumanity exhibited by the staff in question even as we await the hospital’s action or even reaction.
Poor parents after doing all they could to save the girl’s life, they lost her to the act of wickedness unacceptable in any civilized society.
Anything short of an official enquiry into the allegation would not be acceptable. Let it be known to others who lack the humanness needed in a facility like a hospital that this is not a place for them and the earlier they left the better.
Were it possible, the state would have absorbed the cost of treating patients in health facilities but under the circumstances, it is impossible hence the demand that patients foot part of the cost thereof. When, however, under unusual circumstances such as the one under review, a patient is unable to pay, letting them die is unacceptable and therefore actionable.