By Samuel Osei-Frempong
Accra, May 10, GNA – Just after sunrise, Akosua Mensah is already on a plastic chair outside the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital Out-Patient Department. By 7 a.m., the line stretches past the main gate, curling around parked cars and spilling onto the pavement.
She has come from Kasoa, a periphery community of Accra, for a follow-up appointment scheduled for 9 a.m. If she is lucky, she will see a doctor before 2 p.m.
“I wake up at 3 a.m. just to be first in line,” the 42-year-old trader says. “If you come at 8 a.m., you won’t be attended to today.”
Akosua’s experience is not unique. From the Greater Accra Regional Hospital( Accra’s Ridge Hospital) to Komfo Anokye in Kumasi and Cape Coast Teaching Hospital, long queues have come to define Ghana’s public healthcare system. Patients wait hours, sometimes overnight, for consultations, laboratory tests, and prescriptions.
The scenes are a daily reality for millions who rely on state facilities, where a single doctor can be responsible for one hundred or more patients in a day.
Why the queues persist
The root causes are systemic and interconnected. Ghana’s doctor-to-patient ratio stands at about 1:6,500, far below the World Health Organization’s recommended 1:1,000. Nurses and specialists are similarly stretched thin, with many migrating abroad for better pay and working conditions.
Infrastructure has not kept pace with population growth. Ghana’s population now exceeds 34 million, but the number of functional public hospitals and clinics has barely expanded in the last decade. At the same time, the National Health Insurance Scheme has increased access to care, bringing more people through hospital doors without a corresponding increase in staff or facilities.
Administrative bottlenecks compound the problem. Manual records, slow pharmacy dispensing, and fragmented triage systems mean patients often queue multiple times for one visit: at registration, consultation, laboratory, pharmacy, and billing.
The human cost
Beyond lost time and productivity, the delays affect health outcomes. Chronic conditions like hypertension and diabetes go unmanaged when patients skip appointments to avoid the wait. Emergency cases can deteriorate while waiting for triage. For low-income families, a full day lost at the hospital means a day without wages.
What’s being done, and what could work
The government and health authorities have acknowledged the crisis and are piloting several solutions.
The Ghana Health Service is rolling out an electronic medical records system across fifty hospitals, with the goal of reducing paperwork and allowing patients to book slots online. The platform is already active at Ridge Hospital and has reduced average waiting time from four hours to ninety minutes during its pilot phase.
The Community-based Health Planning and Services programme is being expanded to handle minor ailments and follow-up care at the community level.
Some hospitals, including Tamale Teaching Hospital, have introduced evening clinics and weekend outpatient services, easing morning congestion by about thirty per cent.
The NHIA is partnering with licensed private pharmacies and laboratories to dispense medication and conduct routine tests off-site.
The Ministry of Health has increased allowances for doctors and nurses posted to rural and high-pressure facilities, and a new bond policy requires medical graduates to serve two years in public hospitals before private practice.
These are good first moves. They are also incomplete.
The question no one is asking
While the Ministry of Health, the Ghana Health Service, and the NHIA pilot their own systems, a quieter question deserves a public answer. Is government aware that Ghanaian technology startups are already building infrastructure to solve precisely these bottlenecks? Have those startups been formally engaged? Has the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Communications and Digitalisation, or the National Information Technology Agency created an open avenue for home-grown health-tech companies to showcase their platforms, present pilot data, and integrate with national systems?
If such an avenue exists, it is not visible to the founders building these tools. If it does not exist, that is itself a policy failure. The country cannot ask its young engineers to “build for Ghana” while simultaneously procuring foreign systems behind closed doors and leaving local platforms outside the room.
One such platform is BawaHealth, a Ghanaian-built healthcare technology company. What BawaHealth provides is the digital infrastructure that allows partner hospitals to extend their existing care relationships beyond the four walls of the building.
Concretely, partner hospitals can use BawaHealth to:
– Triage non-emergency cases through structured intake before a patient ever joins the OPD queue
– Book in-person OPD and specialist appointments through the same platform so walk-in volume is smoothed across the day instead of crashing into a single morning surge- Schedule virtual consultations with their own clinicians for follow-up and chronic care
– Issue clinician-reviewed Visit Summaries and digital prescription support- Manage post-discharge and chronic disease follow-up without requiring the patient to return in person for routine reviews
Patients access these services through BawaHealth’s patient apps on iOS and Android, which means a mother in Kasoa or a retiree in Tamale can hold their hospital’s appointment desk in their pocket. The platform integrates with existing hospital systems using HL7 FHIR, the globally recognised standard for health data exchange, so it strengthens what hospitals already run rather than replacing it. It aligns with the Ghana Data Protection Act 2012 (Act 843), HeFRA standards, and Ghana Medical and Dental Council credentialing requirements from day one. Hospitals can go live in 1 to 7 days, with no special hardware.
The relevance to Akosua’s morning is direct. If a meaningful share of follow-up appointments, chronic care reviews, and minor consultations can be handled virtually by the patient’s own hospital, OPD queues shorten, inpatient beds free up sooner, and clinicians spend more of their working day on the cases that genuinely require their physical presence. The Ghana Health Service Policy and Strategy on Digital Health 2023 to 2027 already endorses this direction. NHIA telehealth phase three points the same way. The execution gap is what remains, and Ghanaian companies are ready to help close it.
Experts call for deeper reform
Health economists say technology alone will not fix the problem without more investment in infrastructure and workforce training. “We need to build more district hospitals and train more specialists,” says Dr. Kofi Amoah, a public health consultant in Accra. “But we also need to change how we manage patient flow. Triage systems like those used in South Africa’s public hospitals could help prioritise emergencies.” He also points to public-private partnerships as a model. Private clinics and telehealth platforms are already handling around twenty per cent of outpatient consultations in urban areas, easing pressure on state hospitals.
A matter of dignity
For patients like Akosua, the issue is about more than efficiency. “We don’t mind waiting if we know we’ll be seen and treated well,” she says. “But sitting here all day with no water, no shade, no information, that’s what makes it unbearable.”
The Ministry of Health says it is committed to reducing average outpatient waiting time to under two hours by 2028 as part of its Health Sector Medium-Term Development Plan. Whether that target is met will depend on funding, implementation, and sustained political will. It will also depend on whether government opens a formal door to the Ghanaian innovators already working on the same problem, or leaves them outside the gate while the queue keeps growing.
For now, the chairs outside Korle Bu fill up before dawn. And the line keeps growing.
GNA
10 May 2026