Joseph Nelson, the Western Regional Minister, in collaboration with the management of the Takoradi Hospital, is set to establish the region’s first Intensive Care Unit (ICU) within the hospital to deliver critical healthcare services.

The facility, when established, will help to ensure that critical health issues are managed in the region and reduce referrals to such units in other regions.

As part of the plan, the Minister and the management of the hospital have resolved to repurpose a female ward into a state-of-the-art ICU to enhance the region’s critical care capabilities.

Nelson, during an inspection of the designated facility and interactions with the Hospital’s management, said: “Western Region is very big, and to think that we do not have ICU anywhere is a sad situation.”

He said it was vital that the region got its own critical health infrastructure like the ICU, “and so something urgent needs to be done, that is why I decided to collaborate with the Takoradi Hospital to setup this facility.”

Dr George Peprah, the Medical Superintendent of the Takoradi Hospital, welcomed the initiative, noting that the region desperately needed ICU facilities to reduce referrals to Cape Coast.

He said: “Over the years, what we do mainly is to refer critical cases to other facilities, and the closest to us is in the Central Region, and even most of the times, that becomes a challenge because they also face issues with inadequate beds for such patients.”

Having the ICU in the Hospital would not only make it easy for them to manage critical health conditions of patients but also boost the overall healthcare service delivery in the region, he stated.