By Jibril Abdul Mumuni
Accra, March 18, GNA – The Western Region recorded the highest blood availability in Ghana for the year 2025, according to the National Blood Service (NBS) Annual Performance Review.
Dr. Shirley Phyllis Ohenewa Owusu‑Ofori, the Chief Executive Officer of the Service disclosed that the Western Region achieved a Blood Collection Index of 9.4 per 1,000 population, the highest among the 16 regions.
Presenting the 2025 Annual Performance Review of the NBS in Accra, she explained that the Blood Collection Index, a World Health Organisation indicator for assessing national readiness to meet blood supply needs, placed the recommended benchmark for low- and middle-income countries at 10 units per 1,000 population.
Dr. Owusu‑Ofori cited factors contributing to the low performance in some regions.
“These included ageing or inadequate vehicle fleet, insufficient outreach logistics, restricted access to schools, donor misconceptions, funding limitations and inadequate infrastructure in some peripheral facilities,” she said.
She revealed that in certain regions, teams were compelled to pre-finance mobile collection activities due to limited operational resources, a situation she described as unsustainable and detrimental to the national mandate.
She stated that Ghana’s national index improved from 6.1 in 2024 to 6.6 in 2025, marking a steady recovery from the sharp decline experienced during the COVID‑19 pandemic.
Despite this national improvement.
She expressed concern that several of the newly created regions, including Oti, Bono and Western North, recorded some of the lowest inindices.
She noted that these challenges extended beyond blood services, prompting the Ministry of Health to undertake visits and assessments to strengthen health systems in the affected regions.
The NBS, she said, was closely monitoring the situation to ensure that people living in these underserved areas would enjoy equitable access to safe blood.
Providing a national overview, Dr. Owusu‑Ofori announced that Ghana collected 204,000 units of blood in 2025, surpassing the national target of 200,000 units and achieving 102 per cent of the projected goal.
This, she said, represented one of the Service’s strongest performances in recent years and a nine per cent increase over the 187,000 units collected in 2024.
She added, however, that the country still met only 66 per cent of its estimated annual requirement of 308,000 units, based on WHO’s rule‑of‑thumb benchmark of one per cent of a country’s population.
Dr. Owusu‑Ofori outlined ongoing reforms to improve access to safe blood across the country.
She mentioned the authorisation of 28 new blood collection units in collaboration with the Christian Health Association of Ghana, the introduction of a national blood information management system to digitalise operations from donation to transfusion, and efforts to strengthen hemovigilance in partnership with the Food and Drugs Authority.
She added that improvements in blood component processing had resulted in 62 per cent of collected units being separated into components.
The CEO reaffirmed the Service’s commitment to addressing regional imbalances and appealed for continued support from government, development partners and private institutions.
She stressed that the availability of safe blood should never depend on where a patient lived, and called for collective effort to ensure that every region benefitef from an efficient and reliable blood service.
GNA
18 March 2026
Edited by Samuel Osei-Frempong