Some 13 districts are yet to allocate lands for the construction of their share of President Nana Akufo-Addo’s 88 district hospitals promise, Health Minister-designate Kweku Agyeman-Manu has revealed during his vetting by Parliament’s Appointments Committee on Wednesday, 10 February 2021.

He said the President’s “vision” was “supposed to have been translated into action” so he “set up a committee at the presidency, led by the Chief of Staff”.

“I was a member”, the former Health Minister in the President’s first term said, adding: “We pooled one or two infrastructure from our ministry”.

“There was a representation from the Ghana Health Service, too”, he added.

The Dormaa Central MP said: “What they asked us to do immediately was to write to all the district directors for health services to allocate land and give us the site plans of where they want these district hospitals to be sited”.

“As I speak, we still have close to about 13 districts that have not completed this exercise,” he told the committee.

The President mad the promise in the lead-up to the December 2020 polls, saying: “There are 88 districts in our country without district hospitals; we have six (6) new regions without regional hospitals; we do not have five infectious disease control centres dotted across the country, and we do not have enough testing and isolation centres for diseases like COVD-19.”

“We must do something urgently about this. That is why the government has decided to undertake a major investment in our healthcare infrastructure, the largest in our history. We will, this year, begin constructing 88 hospitals in the districts without hospitals,” the President promised.