Dr Rosemary Keatley: The foremost female Ghanaian gynaecologist who transformed Ghana's diagnostics industry

After she completed her training as a gynaecologist – the first Ghanaian woman to do so, Dr. Rosemary Keatley saw a unique opportunity to rather improve the quality of the healthcare and diagnostics industry of the country.

That meant a lot of hard work and a lot of sacrifices but she was more than determined to do so.

Having received her training at the Medical school at Cambridge University, in the United Kingdom, she said coming back home appeared like the right thing for her to do, and it turned out positively for him too.

“I had a private practice in Downtown, Washington DC. There were very few women gynaecologists; I was very doing well but the thought of coming to Ghana, helping my own people really thrilled me: having my children grow up in Ghana and seeing my father was great.

“So, we moved here in 1994… and then one day, the Americans came to see me. They said they had heard I was board certified US physician. We need a doctor in our premises; our doctor is mostly in the Ivory Coast but they’re starting a civil war and they’d like me to come work for them,” she told GhanaWeb in an interview.

Dr. Rosemary Keatly started work and then noticed something unbeknownst to her until then: every embassy had its own lab.

She also realized, from research that had been conducted by the American CDC, that most of the big hospitals in Ghana had been recording very poor lab results, as a result of the low quality of their facilities.

“The CDC came over and realized that the quality of the lab tests were so poor – 80% of the lab tests were unreliable, and diagnostics is a major part of healthcare, so if you don’t get the test results right, the doctor is acting blindly, and people die.

“So, all the embassies have their own labs. I was shocked. So, after six months or so, we learned that SGS – they do a lot of testing at the ports and mines for gold quantities or oil, had opened a human lab. They had human labs in Australia and New Zealand and they brought someone first from New Zealand and then Australia to start this,” she said.

With time, an even bigger opportunity knocked at her door and Dr Keatley jumped for it.

That opportunity would turn into what became the biggest clinical medical laboratory in Ghana.

“And I had a very good relationship with the manager and less than six months later, he called me and said SGS had decided to stop human testing they were selling this lab that had just started, he wanted me to buy it because he knew I was good and although there were a lot of business people who wanted to buy it, they did not know anything about labs.

“So, we had to get to other shareholders to help us and that’s when we took it over in 2000,” she added.

Below is a brief profile of Dr. Rosemary Keatley


Dr Keatley graduated with a medical degree MBBChir from Cambridge University, UK. She held a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Stanford University, USA.

She completed a residency program in Obstetrics and Gynaecology in Washington, DC and obtained her American Board Certification in Ob-Gyn in1994, and worked as a private practitioner in downtown Washington DC.

Dr. Keatley served as CEO of Medlab Ghana Ltd from 2009 until 2019, having been a Board member since 2000. She steered the transformation of Medlab from a small private laboratory to the first ISO:15189 accredited Laboratory in West Africa.

Medlab established branches in 6 cities across Ghana, and created a radiology division including the first privately-operated CT scanner and an active mammography practice. Medlab won an ECOWAS Quality Award at the maiden award inception in 2017.

Dr Keatley took Medlab Ghana Ltd into a merger with Synlab, the largest private laboratory services group in Europe, based in Germany. She retired from the Board after the merger was completed in 2020 with rebranding to Synlab Ghana Ltd.

During Dr Keatley’s tenure as CEO, Medlab Ghana was selected as one of four labs in Africa to participate in the Reference Range project by the International Federation of Clinical Chemistry (IFCC). The results have been published in 2020 and 2022 in international scientific journals for haematology and chemistry.

Dr Keatley is a founding Board member of the Healthcare Federation of Ghana (HFG). In 2020-21, on behalf of HFG, Dr Keatley led the installation of a state-of-the-art digital Laboratory Information System (LIS) in the virology labs at Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research and the Kumasi Centre for Collaborative Research.

The LIS expanded COVID-19 testing capacity by over 50% and was a significant part of Ghana’s response to the pandemic.

Dr Keatley actively promotes awareness of medical and healthcare issues. She was Executive Producer of the African premiere of the reality TV show “How Clean is Your House” which debuted in 2021 on leading television networks in Ghana and West Africa.

AE/OGB