Executive Director of the Northern Patriots in Research and Advocacy (NOPRA), Bismarck Adongo Ayorogo has described the alleged stealing of government medicines at the Upper East Regional Hospital as a heinous crime that should attract the highest form of punishment.
According to Mr. Bismarck Ayorogo, such criminal acts allegedly perpetrated by staff of the hospital has contributed to incessant shortage of drugs at the facility, resulting in needles and avoidable deaths.
“Tens or hundreds of babies have died in this hospital for lack of medication. There are people, our relatives who have died not because of anything but because at the time the hospital said they did not have drugs.
They should go and buy, they went from door to door, looking for money to now go to the drugstore to buy the drugs and go and by the time they got back, their loved one was gone”.
The NOPRA Executive Director recounted how the hospital’s drugstore was completely depleted and the series of actions his outfit and other Civil Society Organisations in the region took to mount pressure on the president and his government to restock the store with the needed medications.
“Last August when the President was coming to this region, with you the media’s support, we raised critical voice that out medical stores in this region were completely empty, depleted, not even paracetamol was there and once he was coming, some of us thought we could measure his impact on this region by dropping something there or authorizing that our drugstores or our medical stores be filled with medications,” he stated.
But “Little did we know that the enemy is just within”.
Condemning the alleged theft, Bismarck Ayorogo said the perpetrators should be made to suffer the most severe form of punishment, stating that meting out death sentence to them will not be out of place.
“Stealing in all forms is criminal and punishable by law but stealing from the sick is more criminal and must be condemned by all and if any punishment that should be meted out to such people, I think death penalty is not an over punishment because they have killed many,” he fumed.
Police, on August 4, arrested 3 staff of the Upper East Regional Hospital for their involvement in theft of government drugs after their cover was blown by Media Without Boarders.
A year long investigation by the media outlet discovered that Raheem Fasilat, a storekeeper at the hospital; Raymond Asoke, the hospital’s driver; Noeyelle Bridget, Assistant Dispensary Officer at the hospital’s pharmacy in connivance with others yet to be identified were allegedly stealing and smuggling drugs belonging to the hospital out of the region.
The investigators trailed Raymond Asoke to an unmarked house where he had gone to load the stolen medicines into a car and alerted the police leading to his arrest.
The other two were subsequently arrested and the drugs retrieved.
The police has since detained them and will arraign them before court.
It, however, said it is casting its investigation net wide in order to identify and arrest any other accomplice.
