The Health Facility Regulator Agency (HeFRA) has embarked on inspection exercise and arrested five people in the Ashanti region for running unapproved health facilities. It also shut down nine unapproved health centres, including a clinic running illegal abortion services.
HeFRA’s exercise seeks to make sure that health facilities comply with safety standards in discharging their duties to the public.
Among some of the aberrations encountered during the two-day exercise were; the use of rudimentary gadgets on unsuspecting patients, unclean equipment, rusty gadgets and many more.
In one instance, abortion was being carried on a patient in one of the facilities at Atonsu, a suburb of Kumasi, when the inspection team got there.
Some of the facilities argued that they were licensed to operate, but could not provide any evidential materials.
Whilst the nine facilities which were closed down were not approved, almost all their employees had no formal training in the health sector.
Some of the unapproved health facilities are; Osbon Diagnostics, Sonoscan Diagnostic Centre, Focus Medical Diagnostics, Krispat Hearing Centre, De-Castro Home Care, Lake Road Clinic and Echoscan Diagnostics Centre.
Investigation carried out by The Chronicle has established that some of these unapproved health centres have been running radio commercials on some local stations in Kumasi to lure the unsuspecting masses to their facilities.
Also, this paper has gathered that all these unapproved health centres are visible on the internet with their address and contact numbers, directing the poor patient to their end.
The Health Institutions and Facilities Act, 2011 (Act 829) established the Health Facilities Regulatory Agency (HeFRA) to license facilities for the provision of public and private health care services.
Section 11 (1 and 2) of the Act states: That a person shall not operate a facility unless the facility is licensed under this Act. That a person shall not operate equipment in a facility specified in the first schedule unless the facility in which the person operates is licensed under this Act.
Addressing the media, Dr. Philip Bannor, the Registrar of HeFRA explained that the closed down facilities had not been licensed and that HeFRA did not even know the quality of gadgets they are using. “We do not even know the quality of the imaging they are using and who is even doing the interpretation on the images that they capture”, he said.
These aberrations, according to Dr. Bannor, affect the quality of care a patient is going to receive, adding that if the doctor who receives the scan gets wrong information, he or she will give the patient a wrong diagnosis and, therefore, likely to get wrong treatment.
Dr Philip Bannor further indicated that for general safety, ultrasound does not have safety challenges but gadgets like X-ray, CT Scan, Mammogram and others are ironised equipment and they emit radiation, “so sometimes if you put the scan somewhere, one have to be sure the place is shielded so that people working on and around it do not emit radiation further than they think, so these are some of the reasons why we embark on these exercise.”
On the closure of Lake Road Clinic, the HeFRA authority told the media that they acted upon intelligence that the facility was doing illegal abortions and other genecology procedures.
“They do not have the license to operate and they are not registered. We did not meet the doctor that works there; we do not know his standing whether he is a doctor or not, but the people that were picked did not have any academic credentials to authenticate they are indeed nurses or otherwise.
The abortions they were carrying out there were unapproved so anything that occurs at unlicensed facility is unapproved and it is not appropriate to conduct any procedure in an unapproved facility”
Asked about the state of some of these equipment, Dr. Philip Bannor underscored that these gadgets were dusty, which made them unhygienic. Some of them too have not been washed or cleaned after use.
“He advised owners of the facilities not to be afraid of what his outfit was doing, saying “they should be bold and step forward to HeFRA and ask us how we can help them, because I believe that there are people who are genuinely trying to do the right thing but do not know where to get the right source of information.
“We have an office in Kumasi near the Central Post Office at Adum, or they can visit our website and communicate with us.”
The post Illegal abortion centre closed down in K’si appeared first on The Chronicle Online.
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