GHANA – The Ghana Infectious Disease Center (GIDC), a 100-bed capacity facility, has installed its first Arterial Blood Gas Analyzer donated by the World Health Organization (WHO) with the support of the World Bank’s Pandemic Emergency Facility Fund.
GIDC is the country’s first infectious disease center built with the support of the Ghana COVID-19 Private Sector Fund in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The facility is Ghana’s major referral point for COVID-19 patients in need of intensive critical care.
The Arterial Blood Gas Analyzer will be used to measure combinations of pH, blood gas (i.e. carbon dioxide and oxygen levels), electrolytes, and metabolites parameters from whole blood samples.
The critical care equipment will in addition, promote efficiency and guide critical case management as well as boost the West African nation’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic by providing optimum intensive care to critically ill patients.
Ghana like many other countries across the globe, is grappling with a third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic driven by the delta variant.
Since July 2021, the number of new COVID-19 cases recorded have increased significantly by 6.5 times compared to the month of June 2021 with 5-fold increase in deaths.
All efforts are being made to provide the best of care to COVID patients but with only 2.7% of the population fully vaccinated and the delta variant in circulation, the country still stands a high risk of COVID-19 infections with increased hospitalizations.
“The equipment will serve as a holistic point of care which will provide a shorter processing time with results in less than 5 minutes instead of the sometimes long waiting time at the laboratory,” said Dr Christian Owoo, Coordinator for Severe and Critical COVID-19 cases.
Ghana has rolled out a rigorous response to the COVID-19 pandemic, including various government-imposed measures including a mandatory wearing of face coverings.
The country is also currently undertaking a nationwide vaccination campaign in efforts to contain the spread of the virus. As of today, health authorities have recorded 118,266 COVID-19 infections with 1,017 fatalities.
Recently, the Ghana Ministry of Health adopted an Integrated Logistics Management Information System, known as GhiLMIS, to help successfully meet and address COVID-19 supply chain needs.
With the Government of Ghana’s high commitment to the COVID-19 pandemic response, their plan was to procure and distribute the appropriate medicines and supplies for the early treatment of cases that would reduce morbidity and mortality. Key to achieving this was GhiLMIS.
The system has been able to capture and process COVID-19 related transactions through the entire value chain while tracking and tracing COVID-19 items throughout the supply chain.
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