Board Chairman of the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital, Professor Titus Kofi Beyuo, has disclosed that plans are in place for the country 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.
This comes on the back of the recent public concerns over overcrowding at the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital which is the nation’s premier referral health facility.
Prof. Beyuo, who is also the Member of Parliament for Lambussie, indicates that the command centre forms a key part of a broader emergency centre management system being set up to reduce the excessive pressure on major referral facilities in the country.
“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 disclosed on Joy FM on Tuesday, March 24, 2026.
The new system, the lawmaker disclosed, will bring an end to ambulance teams having to automatically convey patients to a hospital without knowing whether beds are available or not.
Instead, ambulances will route cases based on real-time data, reducing delays that often worsen outcomes for critically ill patients.
According to him, each of the over 200 national ambulances would be connected to the platform to ensure an effective nationwide deployment, which he pointed out is still in progress.
It is expected that this command centre solves the existing challenge of sending patients to hospitals without prior knowledge of whether there are available beds or otherwise, which ends up exacerbating the already existing overcrowded facilities at these referral centres.
The initiative, he added, will aid the rational distribution of cases across the various health facilities to enhance survival chances of patients.
Prof. Beyuo touted the Minister of Health’s political and administrative momentum to get the system in place, saying Kwabena Mintah Akandoh has been “very committed” in speeding up the process.
Meanwhile, no timeline has been given for when the centre will go live, a situation Prof. Beyuo attributed to infrastructure complexity which involves personnel, training, communication networks and inter-agency coordination.
Korle Bu Doctors’ Association bemoan poor emergency care services at the hospital
