By Alexander Nyarko
Yeboah, GNA
Tema, July 19, GNA –
Tema Lube Oil Company Limited has presented an ambulance to the Tema General
Hospital to aid in its role as the only major referral hospital within the Tema
region serving a large number of communities.
The ambulance, which
is worth 232,320.00 Ghana Cedis, is to improve health care delivery within the
Tema region and end the dependence on non-emergency vehicles from being used to
convey patients in critical conditions.
In an address,
during the presentation, the Board Chairman of Tema Lube Oil, Mr. Kow Abaka
Quansah, observed that “the absence of an ambulance in such a facility is not
good and might have led to needless deaths. For this reason, Tema Lube Oil
decided to present this facility to make the hospital more efficient.”
He said, “As a
socially responsible company, we have over the years donated various items to
organizations, institutions and communities in the country, especially within
our immediate environs, which include: Tema Polyclinic, Tema Library, Tema
Municipal Authority (TMA), Tema Regional Police Command, Tema Manheam Community
School and E&T Department of Korle bu Teaching Hospital and the Ghana Heart
Foundation, just to mention a few.”
Mr. Quansah said
that, as part of the package, Tema Lube Oil would pay insurance on the
ambulance for one year and also take care of maintenance of the vehicle over
the said period.
He said, “The
Company is able to do these things and might do more if there is greater
patronage of our products, namely the high quality and competitively priced
lubricants that we blend locally for the Oil Marketing Companies in Ghana and
mostly sold at Fuel Filling stations throughout the country.”
The Managing
Director of Tema Lube Oil Company Limited, Mr. Amos Donkoh, recounted some of
the gestures Tema Lube Oil had made to the hospital by saying, “We’ve donated a
patient monitoring machine to them before; we’ve also given them a lifesaving
machine. We’ve actually donated an ambulance to them before, but that has been
scraped off, that’s why we are bringing this one to them.”
Mr. Donkoh said,
“Lube Oil shouldn’t keep all the profit it makes alone; the community should
also benefit to complete the relevance of Tema Lube Oil to the Ghanaian
society.”
He asked other
corporate organizations to emulate the example of Tema Lube Oil and reach out
to sections of society that needed help in order to shoulder some of the
burdens on government and make people’s lives better.
He added that, “Very
soon we’ll be making a donation of a police booth to the TMA. So we’re
currently constructing a police booth at the Timber Market area to enhance
security in the system. That’s what we’ll be doing; that should happen in the
next three months.”
He said Tema Lube
Oil remained committed to providing assistance to individuals and organizations
in the areas of health, sanitation, education and security.
Receiving the
donation, the Medical Director of Tema General Hospital, Dr. Kwabena
Edusei-Poku, promised to put the facility to good use to justify the efforts of
Tema Lube Oil.
He informed of how
determined he was to ensure the vehicle was fully functional at all times to
serve the purpose for which it was donated.
Dr. Edusei-Poku
observed the need for an institutional ambulance system by saying, “The
national ambulance has challenges and difficulties, and so we feel that the
bigger hospitals should run their own ambulance system instead, and this is
where Tema Lube Oil comes in handy.”
He observed that it
was difficult for patients to move around when there were no ambulances and had
to resort to taxis which posed challenges in conveying patients and sometimes
led to fatalities.
GNA