Ghana is working to set up a national command centre that will allow doctors to sort and redirect emergency patients to hospitals with available beds in real time, according to the board chairman of the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital, Prof. Titus Beyuo.
Prof. Beyuo, who is also a Member of Parliament for Lambussie, disclosed the plan this week amid renewed public concern over overcrowding at the country’s premier referral health facility.
Speaking on the Joy Super Morning Show on Tuesday, March 24, he said the command centre forms a key part of a broader emergency patient management system the government is trying to operationalise to ease pressure on major referral facilities.
“We need the ambulance service to relocate their call centre to this national command centre. We need to get physicians and other people at the command centre who will do an online sorting of patients and redirect them,” he explained.
Under the new system, ambulance teams will no longer send patients automatically to Korle Bu or Komfo Anokye without knowing whether beds are available.
Instead, ambulances will route cases based on real-time data, reducing delays that often worsen outcomes for critically ill patients.
Prof. Beyuo said every one of Ghana’s 200-plus ambulances must be connected to the platform before it can work a nationwide deployment effectively, which he said is still in progress.
The command centre is expected to address one of the biggest frustrations in Ghana’s emergency system: patients being rushed to already overcrowded hospitals because families and ambulance crews have no visibility on bed availability elsewhere.
He noted that the new arrangement should help distribute cases more rationally across facilities and improve survival chances.
He credited the current Minister of Health for pushing the political and administrative momentum required to get the system off the ground, describing the minister as “very committed” to speeding up the process.
No timeline was given for when the centre will go live.
Prof. Beyuo cautioned that the complexity of the infrastructure involving personnel, training, communication networks, and inter-agency coordination makes it difficult to commit to a firm date.
