The Chief Executive Officer of the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital, Dr. Yakubu Seidu Adam, has asked Parliament’s Select Committee on Health to help the hospital build a new Accident and Emergency Centre with a capacity of at least 200 beds.
Dr. Adam made the appeal during the committee’s visit to the hospital, saying the current 64-bed unit cannot keep pace with the demand placed on it by patients from every part of the country.
Dr. Adam said the hospital has a bed capacity of close to 2,000, but its accident and emergency centre has only 64 beds. He told the committee that management has one request.
“We have one and only one plea to the Parliamentary Select Committee on Health. We want you to help us build a new accident and emergency centre with at least 200-bed capacity.”
Chief Executive Officer of the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital, Dr. Yakubu Seidu Adam
A 200-bed facility would be more than three times the size of the present unit, and the request sets out the scale of the expansion management believes is needed.
The CEO was careful to say that a larger centre would not by itself end the “no bed” problem that has dogged the hospital. Management, he said, is doing everything within its power to make sure patients do not stay in the emergency centre for more than 24 hours.
That means moving patients out as quickly as their condition allows, to the medical and surgical wards and the other departments of the hospital. A centre can have a thousand beds, he explained, but if there is no system to move patients out continuously, it will still fill up. Flow matters as much as capacity.
The case he made is therefore for two things together. One is a bigger emergency centre. The other is a disciplined system of discharge and transfer that keeps beds turning over.
An Emergency Centre for the Whole Country
Dr. Adam said the Korle Bu emergency centre serves far more than Accra. Patients are referred from across Ghana, and he said he receives calls about emergencies every day.
“There is no region I have not received a call from. There’s an emergency here, an emergency there, day in and day out.”
Chief Executive Officer of the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital, Dr. Yakubu Seidu Adam
He said he often alerts the head of the department that a patient is on the way from Wa, from Tamale or from the Volta Region. Because the hospital is the country’s premier referral centre, the emergency unit takes cases that smaller facilities cannot manage.
He pleaded directly with the committee’s chairman to come to the hospital’s aid.
Pressure on the Emergency Unit
His appeal is consistent with the pressure the unit has reported. In August 2026, the Head of the Accident and Emergency Department, Dr. Henry Bulley, told the Ghana News Agency that daily attendance had risen to more than 100 patients. He said most emergency cases, apart from women in labour and children with non-trauma conditions, are referred to the department.
Dr. Bulley listed strokes, sudden loss of consciousness, severe diabetic complications, kidney disease and road crashes among the conditions presenting. Road traffic cases in the first half of 2026 reached 553, up from 379 in the same period of 2025, according to figures he cited. He said the causes of the rising numbers have not been established and called for further study.
Committee Visit in Context
The appeal came as the committee visited Korle Bu, where the Deputy Ranking Member, Patrick Boakye-Yiadom, also urged government to train more specialised doctors and nurses for Ghana’s cardiac centres.
Together, the two appeals point to the hospital’s most pressing needs: skilled people to deliver specialised care, and enough space in which emergency patients can be received and treated.
Attention now turns to how the committee carries the request to Parliament and to the Ministry of Health. A 200-bed emergency centre would need funding, design and a construction timeline. In the meantime, the hospital says it will keep moving patients out of the emergency centre within 24 hours so that the unit can receive the next case
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