Two separate groups of medical professionals at the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital (KBTH) have publicly contradicted the hospital’s chief executive, confirming that a viral video showing patients receiving care on the floor of the Accident and Emergency (A&E) Centre is authentic and warning that management staged a clean-up before the Health Minister arrived to inspect conditions.
The rebuttals, issued on Monday, March 23, come days after Chief Executive Officer Dr. Yakubu Seidu Adam pushed back against the footage, suggesting it did not reflect how the hospital manages patients and may have been artificially generated.
Emergency Medicine Residents at KBTH said in a statement that the footage accurately captures the conditions under which care is being delivered. “The video footage is authentic. When the surge in patients exhausted all available beds, chairs were provided. When those chairs were also exhausted, patients had no option but to receive care on the floor. This sequence was witnessed by every member of our clinical team,” they said.
The residents rejected suggestions the footage was manipulated, stating that describing it as AI-generated or media slander was “factually inaccurate and an affront to both patients and staff.”
The Korle Bu Doctors Association (KODA) went further, alleging that the hospital was made to look presentable before Health Minister Kwabena Mintah Akandoh’s visit on Saturday, March 21. “It is normal practice to prepare prior to a visit by a minister of state. New bedsheets are provided for all beds, including those previously without bedsheets; everything is re-arranged to look perfect,” KODA said.
KODA said the association expressed grave concern over the escalating challenges in emergency care, stating that recent administrative directives had led to a surge in patient admissions that far exceeded the physical and human resource capacity of the A&E Centre.
The association called on the Ministry of Health and KBTH management to stop making scapegoats out of a problem they were responsible for as leaders of healthcare.
Both groups pointed to systemic failures rather than ward-level problems as the root cause of the crisis. The Emergency Medicine Residents cited dysfunctional referral pathways, absent pre-hospital coordination and the lack of a national bed-tracking system as the key drivers of overcrowding, and said the solution lay not in adding more beds to already congested spaces, but in strengthening the entire healthcare system.
KODA said Ghana must transition from crisis management to systemic correction.
The controversy is the latest chapter in a deepening public health emergency. In February 2026, KBTH interdicted two doctors and two nurses following their alleged failure to provide emergency care to a hit-and-run victim, 29-year-old Charles Amissah, who later died after reportedly being turned away by multiple facilities. President John Dramani Mahama subsequently directed health workers to admit emergency patients even when beds were unavailable, a directive that sources confirm has contributed to the overcrowding now visible in the viral footage.
The Ministry of Health has pledged to expand bed capacity across multiple public hospitals as part of a longer-term response to the no-bed crisis.
