The new morgue abandoned in the bush
Medical Director of the Tema General Hospital, Dr Kwabena Opoku-Adusei, has described the newly-constructed morgue for the facility as a ‘white elephant’ which is only occupying space.
According to him, several years after the facility’s completion, government is yet to furnish the mortuary with cold room and the needed equipment to enable it to perform its mandate to preserve corpses for clinical and pre-burial services.
A comprehensive range of post-mortem examination products, including dissecting, autopsy, necropsy tables, sinks, refrigerators, grossing stations, and cabinetry are yet to be fixed in the building.
Authorities of the hospital, DAILY GUIDE learnt, were not consulted before the start of the building which has been described as a bad architectural design.
The Tema Metropolitan Assembly (TMA) through its own initiative was said to have rushed to put up the mortuary which is anticipated to accommodate about 1,000 dead bodies, offices, changing room, embalming apartment, washrooms and a Muslim department.
The hospital still uses the tumble-down morgue which was once closed down due to serious structural defects and malfunction refrigerators which gave way to rats to feed on corpses.
Construction of the mortuary building which successive governments have used as a campaign tool on election platforms now seems to have been abandoned to its fate in a bush.
Notwithstanding the fact that weeds are gradually taking over the building which residents in Tema thought would have been completed by now following the kind of attention it garnered during the last general elections from candidates who wanted to win political power and captured in the current government’s ‘Green Book’ as completed, the building has left most residents asking questions about when it will be in operational.
According to the director of the hospital, “A mortuary without fridges and other logistics is just a building and waste since we cannot buy the equipment because it is very expensive and central government must ensure that the mortuary get the equipment.”
Although he commended TMA for construction of the building to replace the dilapidated one, he was quick to add that “it could not function without a fridge and other equipment and the hospital cannot afford the price of the equipment with Internally Generated Fund (IGF).”
The director of the hospital disclosed that “if you one day come here and look for me and do not find me, then you have to know the building has caved in on me because the structure is full of cracks and anything can happen. Tema General Hospital is beyond repairs, thereby, there is the need for government to consider building a new hospital for the people of Tema like the Ridge Hospital.”
Dr Opoku-Adusei charged officials to desist from the trend of renovating the cracks in the structures, advising that the hospital must be rebuilt with the money invested in putting up a new building since the hospital has a large track of land to accommodate new structures.
From Vincent Kubi, Tema