By Bertha Badu-Agyei, GNA
Mampong-Akuapem, Feb 21, GNA - The Ghana Society of the Physically Disabled (GSPD), has appealed to President Nana Akufo Addo to intervene in a dispute between International Save our Souls Society (ISSOS) and the Medicas Hospital.
This, they argued would enable them to recover the Kunta Kinte Orthopaedic hospital at Mampong.
The Kunta Kinte orthopedic hospital, now Medicas hospital at Mampong, was originally built and operated jointly by the GSPD and an American philanthropists Mr Bryan Lowe under a registered NGO called the ISSOS, to provide specific healthcare services to persons with disability in Ghana and beyond.
According to Mr Daniel Agyekum, the Eastern Regional Coordinator of the GSPD, the hospital was a "fully fledged orthopaedic facility, with a well-equipped workshop centre that produced and repaired callipers and prosthesis and corrective surgeries to alleviate the plight of their members at a subsidised cost".
Apart from the healthcare services it provided, the Hospital also provided jobs to many of its members who were working at the workshop as shoemakers, callipers and prosthesis operators, the laundry, and the kitchen, improving their sources of livelihoods
Addressing a News conference to press home their demand for the facility to be reverted to its original status, he recalled that Mr Bryan Lowe and Madam Dorothy Lowe from the USA came to the Mampong area in the late 1980s to farm, but somewhere along the line got involved in the activities of Persons living with Disabilities (PWDs) in the Region and promised to help them.
He said in 1991, the Lowe siblings and Mrs Mercy Attuah Sakyi, a physically disabled person and leader of the GSPD in the region formed the ISSOS, as an NGO and officially registered it to take care of physically disabled persons, the aged and less privileged persons in Ghana.
Mr Agyekum said in order to achieve their goals, the ISSOS executives under the leadership of Mr Bryan Lowe went round the country and took pictures and data of physically disabled persons to use in a proposal to raise funds in the USA to build an orthopaedic hospital at Mampong adding that "all materials and equipment imported in the name of ISSOS to build the hospital were donated to the NGO by its foreign partners and the importations were duty-free".
However, he said their problems started when Mr Lowe the leader of the NGO died in 2008, as he had unknowingly to the other members of the ISSOS, willed the Kunta Kinte orthopaedic hospital to his son Mr Gregory Alexander, who later on came to Ghana and sacked all persons with physical disability working at the facility and took it over.
The GSPD coordinator said all the workshop centres producing the relevant equipment to aid the physically disabled persons such as the callipers and ability bicycles had been closed down with the equipment left to rot.
He said several attempts to have the facility now being operated by a private investor hired by the son of Mr Bryan Lowe, under the name Medicas hospital had proved futile and therefore appealed to the President to use his good offices to ensure that the facility reverted to its original status.
Madam Mercy Atua Sakyi, the founding member of the ISSOS who was present at the conference said she worked as a cashier at the hospital since 2006 until 2013 when the son of the late Mr Bryan Lowe took over the facility and sacked them.
She disclosed that through her efforts, the land on which the hospital was situated was donated to the ISSOS by the then traditional leaders of Mampong and stressed that the facility was not a private property by Mr Lowe for it to be willed to his son.
According to her, if not for the support and hardwork of the members of the GSPD of which she was the leader then, in rallying their members to get involved in the proposal to solicit funds, "Mr Lowe and his sister alone could not have acquired the land, built the hospital and procured the equipment".
Documents ranging from the land acquisition through the fundraising and subsequent construction and importation of all the building materials and hospital equipment produced at the News conference are in the name of the ISSOS.
GNA
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