Emergency medicine residents at Korle Bu Teaching Hospital are pushing back against management’s dismissal of viral footage showing patients receiving care on the floor, saying the images accurately depict conditions inside one of Ghana’s busiest emergency units.

In a statement issued Monday, the residents said the videos reflect the reality of a system strained beyond capacity. When beds and chairs were exhausted amid a surge of patients, they said, some individuals had no alternative but to be treated on the floor.

The hospital’s chief executive, Yakubu Seidu Adam, had earlier questioned the authenticity of the footage, suggesting it did not represent typical conditions in the emergency ward. The residents rejected that characterization, calling such claims “factually inaccurate” and dismissive of both patients and frontline staff.

They argued that the crisis cannot be resolved by simply increasing the number of beds, noting that effective emergency care depends on a broader set of resources, including oxygen supply points, monitoring equipment, adequate space and sufficient staffing levels. Adding beds without those elements, they said, risks worsening congestion in an already overstretched facility.

The group framed the situation as part of a wider breakdown in Ghana’s healthcare system rather than an isolated institutional failure. They pointed to weak referral networks, limited pre-hospital coordination and the absence of a national system to track available hospital beds as key structural shortcomings.

Patients are frequently referred to tertiary centers like Korle Bu because lower-level facilities lack capacity, while critically ill individuals often arrive without prior stabilization or notice, further compounding the strain on emergency services.

The residents called on hospital leadership and the Ministry of Health to prioritize systemic reforms over what they described as public-relations responses, urging investment in a more coordinated national emergency care framework.
“The evidence is real. The crisis is real,” the statement said, adding that meaningful improvements would require strengthening the broader healthcare network rather than expanding stopgap measures within individual hospitals.

Source:TheDotNews