The Korle Bu Teaching Hospital in Accra, Ghana has a newly renovated National Diabetes Management and Research Centre (NDMRC), furnished with equipment acquired through a donation from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. On 6 November, 2024, President Alfred Kyungu, president of the Africa West Area of the Church, officially handed over the equipment. The centre facilitates the coordination and delivery of multidisciplinary diabetes care and trains undergraduate and postgraduate health personnel in offering specialized care and promoting diabetes related research. It currently serves over 10,000 registered patients.
Since its establishment in 1995, the diabetes centre has served the community as it was best able, but over the years it faced ever-growing challenges with lack of appropriate resources such as equipment, space, and more. As a result, not only was it hampered in administering quality health care, it was also failing to attract younger practitioners into the discipline.
Recognizing the need to renovate and upgrade the centre, the hospital moved it into a makeshift facility that was intended to be a temporary home until the necessary renovations could be completed, but those renovations stalled in 2022. Recognizing that the upgrade was exclusively structural and didn’t include necessary diagnostic and treatment equipment, the centre reached out to The Church with a request for help.
Responding to the plea, the Church has donated new diagnostic, treatment, laboratory, and educational equipment that will enable the centre to now perform optimally, including, among other things, a retinal scanner, hospital beds and wheelchairs, an ECG and Arterial blood Gas machine, and much, much more. Furthermore, doctors and nurses will now be trained in the use of that state-of-the-art equipment and in new techniques and practices.
In acknowledging the Church’s generous donation, Doctor Yacoba Atiase, head of the NDMRC, told those in attendance at the ceremony that “This donation represents much more than money or the equipment that you see here. It represents to us a sensitivity to the needs of others, which is what the Church is all about.” Besides the extensive list of medical equipment, the donation also included equipment designed to offer physical therapy and exercise to patients. Dr. Atiase expressed profound gratitude for the donation, saying that “for the first time, the National Diabetes Management and Research Centre is going to have a fully equipped gymnasium for its patients.”
In formalizing the delivery of the donated equipment, President Kyungu told the NDMRC, “It has been our privilege to participate in a cause that not only improves the care that can be given here in Accra to sufferers of diabetes, but also will aid in teaching new generations of medical professionals how to be healers across the country now and into the future. We deliver these renovated and refurbished facilities to you trusting that our donations will be used to bless the lives of those for whom they were intended.”
