The government has described as false purported reports suggesting that the Afari Military Hospital in the Atwima-Nwabiagya District of the Ashanti Region, has been completed.
Work on the 500-bed facility, according to the Ministry of Defence (MoD), was yet to be finalized as the contractors, Messrs. Euroget De-Invest, upped efforts to put finishing touches to it.
“Construction is still ongoing,” Kofi Amankwah-Manu, Deputy Defence Minister, told the media after inspecting the progress of work.
He hinted that the project was about 92 per cent complete, and hopefully, the contractors were expected to complete and hand over the facility to the government in December, this year.
The Hospital, estimated at about $200 million, comes with 50 medical and non-medical buildings, 15 operating theatres, two endoscopy operating rooms, nine delivery rooms, 153-body-capacity mortuary and 64 staff housing units.
Other facilities include; hospital information system and power station, medical gas plant, medical waste treatment department, water treatment plant, training, library and conference rooms, internal and external CCTV system and sewage treatment biogas plant, as well as sterilization department and power station.
Mr Amankwah-Manu, who is also the Member of Parliament for Atwima-Kwanwoma, said details in the recent video circulating on social media about the state of the facility were misrepresented.
“The video claims that the project was completed in 2018 and handed over to the government, but this is a fallacy,” he insisted.
Again, it was also not true that some vital equipment such as the Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machine and CT scan had been left under the mercy of the weather.
“No medical equipment has been exposed to the weather. The video clip should, therefore, be ignored in its entirety,” he told the media.
The Deputy Defence Minister said the government was committed to ensuring value for money in all health-related projects under construction.
The authorities would always put premium on the health of the people, because the wellbeing of the citizenry was vital in the nation’s development agenda, he noted.
Ashanti Regional Minister, Simon Osei-Mensah, said the government was monitoring closely all ongoing health projects in the Region to ensure their successful completion.
GNA