Two words.
No bed.
Clinical. Casual. Catastrophic.
Behind those two words are grieving families… ambulances driving in circles… and a nation asking how we got here — again.
We said “Never again” in 2018 when Prince Anthony Opoku-Acheampong died after reportedly being turned away by multiple hospitals. We said “System failure.” We promised reform.
And yet, years later, another young man is reportedly shuttled from hospital to hospital — and dies.
So let’s stop pretending this is about furniture.
This is not about beds.
It is about priorities.
It is about planning.
It is about political will.
In 2001, African leaders gathered in Nigeria and signed the Abuja Declaration, pledging to allocate at least 15 percent of national budgets to health.
Twenty-five years later, can we confidently say health has been treated like a priority — or like an afterthought?
Because when emergency rooms say “no bed,” what they are really saying is:
We are overwhelmed.
We are under-resourced.
We are under-coordinated.
And that is a governance issue.
But outrage is not a policy.
Can we have a national real-time bed tracking system linked to the Ambulance Service. If we can track food delivery in minutes, we can track ICU availability.
Strict enforcement of stabilise first, transfer later. No emergency patient should be turned away without life-saving intervention. And where there is negligence, there must be consequences.
Because when patients die in ambulances, what dies with them is trust.
And a country that cannot find space for its sick
is running out of space for its conscience.
My name is Lily Mohammed and these are my two cents.
The author is an award-winning on-air personality with the EIB Network, as well as a television producer, voice-over artist, and gender advocate.
