President Mahama commissioned a rebuilt cardiac catheterisation laboratory at Korle Bu Teaching Hospital on Thursday, restoring a facility he first opened in 2017 that a fire destroyed in March 2025.
The original lab, commissioned by Mahama in January 2017, had let cardiologists in Ghana perform angiograms, angioplasty, stent placement and pacemaker implantation locally for eight years, sparing patients trips abroad for procedures that guide catheters through blood vessels using X-ray and fluoroscopy imaging. A fire on March 7, 2025 destroyed the facility, disrupting emergency cardiac care at the country’s premier referral hospital. The Ghana Medical Trust Fund, known as MahamaCares, assessed the damage in January 2026 and chose to rebuild a larger, more advanced version rather than simply replace what was lost. Construction ran from February 17 to July 2026, under five months. “We celebrate the creation of something even better than what we lost,” Mahama said at the commissioning.
The National Cardiothoracic Centre, which will run the lab, currently performs about 600 cardiac, thoracic and vascular surgeries a year and logs roughly 12,000 patient visits, including about 1,500 new referrals, according to its director, Dr Kow Entsua-Mensah. Even before formally resuming full operations, the facility is set to host a cardiac intervention programme beginning July 12 in partnership with visiting American cardiologists, the Mount Carmel Foundation and Africa World Airlines, in which 30 patients selected from across the country will undergo complex cardiac device procedures.
The Korle Bu rebuild is part of a wider expansion of catheterisation labs to Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital in Kumasi and Tamale Teaching Hospital, a push that followed the death of a Komfo Anokye doctor, Dr Kwame Adu Ofori, who suffered a heart attack requiring the kind of intervention a cath lab provides and died before he could reach one in Accra. Mahama said MahamaCares now carries a GH¢2.3 billion allocation covering not just patient treatment but infrastructure and workforce training, including a newly approved cohort of 500 critical care nurses, the first of whom have begun training at Korle Bu. He also announced a new subsidiary, Ghana Medical Equipment Services Limited, to maintain hospital equipment going forward, and said procurement had begun for a new maternity block to replace the hospital’s aging Gordon-Guggisberg building, which he described as a safety risk to mothers and staff.
