By Edzorna Francis Mensah
President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has announced his intention to complete all the 111 promised hospitals the year 2025.
The President in his message on The State of The Nation delivered on Wednesday, 30th March 2021, at Parliament House, Accra noted that, “we have every intention of seeing this project through to a successful end, which will enable me to commission all one hundred and eleven (111) hospitals before I leave office on 7th January 2025”.
According to him, it is evident that the initial schedule they gave for the completion of Agenda 111 was overly ambitious because “identifying suitable sites around the country, for example, has turned out to be even more problematic than had been anticipated”.
But he however submitted that, a great deal of the preparatory work has now been completed, and work has started at eighty-seven (87) of the one hundred and eleven (111) sites and there is an assurance that preliminary work on the remaining twenty-four (24) sites is ongoing.
Agenda 111 was born out of this necessity to address some of these shortcomings. At the normal rate of growth, they are not likely to make up the deficit in our health facilities infrastructure for a very long time. Hence, the need for a special, dedicated programme of infrastructural development.
“We are undertaking the construction of 111 entities, which comprise standard 100-bed district hospitals for one hundred and one (101) districts without hospitals, with accommodation for doctors and nurses; six (6) new regional hospitals for each of the six (6) new regions; the rehabilitation of the Effia-Nkwanta Hospital in the Western Region; one (1) new regional hospital for the Western Region; and three (3) psychiatric hospitals for each of the three (3) zones of the country, i.e. North, Middle and Coastal”.
He added that, “it is an ambitious project, which must and will be done, and which will create some thirty-three thousand, nine hundred (33,900) jobs for construction workers, and, on completion, some thirty-four thousand, three hundred (34,300) jobs for health workers”.
