Ghana: 118 Minutes of Neglect - Who Killed Charles Amissah?

19 May 2026
Ghanaian Times (Accra)
By NANA ANNOR AMIHERE II

On the night of February 6, 2026, a 29-year-old engineer named Charles Amissah was struck by a hit-and-run driver near the Kwame Nkrumah Circle Overpass in Accra. The National Ambulance Service was on the scene within three minutes. Over the next 118 minutes, Mr Amissah was carried, alive, to the Police Hospital, the Greater Accra Regional Hospital (Ridge), and the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital, the country's premier referral centre. At each gate he was turned away. He bled to death in the back of an ambulance from a single laceration of the upper right arm.

The committee of inquiry, chaired by Professor Agyeman Badu Akosa, has now ruled this an avoidable death from medical neglect, not from trauma. The deeper truth is harder still. Charles Amissah was killed not by the driver who fled, nor by the four medical staff who have been interdicted, but by a national emergency-care architecture that, in 2026, is functionally absent. This article sets out what that architecture looks like from inside it, and what must be done before the next 118 minutes begin.

1. The anatomy of 118 Minutes

The timeline of Mr Amissah's death is a matter of public record, reconstructed from the National Ambulance Service's Situational Report and confirmed by the Akosa Committee:

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  • 22:32 - Walk-in call received; ambulance dispatched.
  • 22:35 - Crew arrives at the scene of the crash. The patient is found lying supine, with profuse bleeding from a deep shoulder laceration. The crew, by all accounts, performs textbook pre-hospital care: bleeding controlled, cervical collar applied, log-roll onto a spine board, oxygen initiated, vital signs monitored every five minutes.
  • 22:43 - Arrival at the Police Hospital. The patient is rejected; the crew offers their own ambulance trolley to ease space; they are told there is no space within the facility.
  • 22:58 - Arrival at the Greater Accra Regional Hospital, Ridge. Same answer.
  • 23:20 - Arrival at the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital. The crew is told to proceed to the University of Ghana Medical Centre at Legon. They refuse, on the proper clinical ground that further movement will kill the patient.
  • 00:30 (approx.) - Cardiac arrest. The crew initiates CPR.
  • 00:50 - A duty officer at Korle Bu finally emerges, certifies death, and instructs the body be taken to the mortuary.

In none of those 118 minutes did a single doctor or nurse, at any of three flagship public hospitals, walk to the ambulance bay to take a pulse, examine the wound, or transfuse a unit of blood. The pathology, according to Prof. Akosa, is unambiguous: Mr Amissah died of exsanguination, the slow, mechanical loss of blood from an injury that any competent emergency room could have addressed in minutes.

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2. The patient survived the crash. He did not survive the hospitals

This is the sentence that ought to lodge itself in the national conscience. The hit-and-run driver did not kill Charles Amissah. His injury, by the committee's own pathological finding, was treatable. He was alive at the Police Hospital. He was alive at Ridge. He was alive at Korle Bu. He was alive when the crew refused, on his behalf, to be sent on a fourth journey across Accra.

What killed him was the cumulative weight of institutional indifference; the readiness, repeated three times in a single night, to look at a bleeding young man and answer "no bed." A bleeding patient on an ambulance trolley does not, in any rational triage system, require a bed. He requires a tourniquet, a transfusion, and a doctor's hands. None of these has any inventory constraint at a teaching hospital. The bed was a pretext. The reality is a culture in which the ambulance arriving at the gate is treated as someone else's problem until it is too late to be anyone's.

3. The view from the Western Region: A region without an ICU

The Amissah case unfolded in Accra, where the country's medical resources are most concentrated. Consider, then, the view from outside the capital.

I write as a chief and as an environmental and safety professional with four decades in the field. I write also as a man who, very recently, watched my 74-year-old uncle survive surgery at the Ghana Ports and Harbours Authority Hospital in Takoradi only because a stranger died at the right time.

My uncle's post-operative care required an Intensive Care Unit. The entire Western Region of Ghana, an oil and gas region, a region that produces a substantial share of the nation's foreign exchange, does not have a single functioning ICU. The nearest ICU was the Cape Coast Interbeton Government Hospital, three hours by ambulance, with a total capacity of four beds for the combined population of the Western and Central regions. He was rushed across two regions on a road, the Cape Coast highway, that itself produces road-traffic casualties on a daily basis. He survived only because, in the hour his ambulance was en route, one of those four beds had just been cleared by the death of its previous occupant.

This is not anecdote. It is the system. A region of more than three million people, with a deep-sea port, a domestic airport, an oil and gas industry, and a brand-new oil refinery in planning, depends for its critical care on the timing of someone else's funeral.

4. A "basic laceration" is now a death sentence

Mr Amissah's wound was, in clinical language, a soft-tissue and bony injury of the upper right arm. In any properly equipped ambulance in any properly functioning emergency system, it is treated en route. Direct pressure, a pressure bandage, a tourniquet if required, intravenous fluids and, in the receiving facility, blood replacement and surgical haemostasis. None of these requires a teaching hospital. None requires an ICU. They are the alphabet of pre-hospital trauma care.

Yet the committee has now found that some of the very Emergency Medical Technicians on duty that night had not been trained in critical emergency procedures. They were, in Prof. Akosa's blunt phrase, couriers. Couriers cannot maintain life. They can only deliver bodies.

5. Where accountability must land

Four medical staff at Korle Bu have been interdicted, their names withheld. The Police Hospital and Ridge Hospital have said nothing at all. The hit-and-run driver remains untraced.

Individual sanction without institutional reform is a familiar Ghanaian ritual that changes nothing. The Amissah case demands of the state the following:

  • A national electronic emergency-bed and trauma-coordination system, operated in real time, so that no ambulance crew ever again negotiates admission gate by gate.
  • A statutory duty of stabilisation. Any patient delivered to the gate of a public health facility must be triaged at that gate. Refusal to triage must be a disciplinary and, where appropriate, a criminal offence.
  • Functional ICUs in every region without exception. The Western Region cannot be allowed to continue without one. Effia Nkwanta Regional Hospital, the regional referral centre, must be capitalised to deliver intensive care commensurate with the region's population and economic weight.
  • Genuinely trained Emergency Medical Technicians, equipped with the drugs, blood products, and authority to maintain life in transit. An ambulance is a mobile resuscitation room, or it is a hearse.
  • An honest accounting from the Police Hospital and Ridge Hospital. Their silence on Mr Amissah's death is, in itself, an indictment.

6. Closing

Charles Amissah was 29. He was an engineer at Promasidor Ghana Limited. He was somebody's son, somebody's brother, somebody's promise. He died because a system designed to save him had, long before the night of February 6, been allowed to decay into a procession of locked doors.

The question with which this article opened, "who killed Charles Amissah," has only one honest answer. We did. By tolerating, year upon year, an emergency-care architecture that turns a treatable laceration into a death sentence, we made his death possible and the next one inevitable, unless we now act. One hundred and eighteen minutes is a short time in the life of a state. It was the whole of the life that remained to him.

The Writer is Immediate Past National President, Ghana Institute of Safety and Environmental Professionals (GhISEP) and Traditional Ruler

Read the original article on Ghanaian Times.

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