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Copenhagen Consensus Center

Maintain Ambulances to Save Lives in Rural Ghana

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One of the high value-for-money propositions which is placed into the top-ten list for the Ghana Priorities project is to maintain the rural emergency transport system.

Ghana’s emergency health services system is mainly informal in both urban and rural areas. The majority of patients who are severely injured or ill are transported to the health facilities by commercial vehicles such as taxis or local minibusses. In the rural areas where such commercial vehicles are not common, patients requiring emergency care are transported on bicycles or motorbikes or sometimes, in locally made carts driven by animals. Such heavy reliance on informal means of transportation increases the risk of complications of patients’ health conditions."

Read the full op-ed published in Ghana’s newspaper of record The Daily Graphic.