Health Essentials
Pause and reflect: Lifesaving power of pets
In a country filled with stress, social unrest and lingering scars of a pandemic, pets have emerged as silent healers, loyal companions and even lifesavers.
From the bustling streets of Accra to the rural communities in the Northern Region, pets have been woven into the social fibre that offers a sense of hope. Science calls it the ‘Pet effect’, while others call it a blessing.
This marks the untold story of how pets are saving humans emotionally and psychologically across the globe.
Cultural tapestry of pets in
societies
Historically, animals have held diverse roles in societies – right from being guardians, through to being helpers on the farm and fast becoming symbols of spiritual importance.
In the Konkomba society for instance, certain animals like dogs, rabbits, and cats are revered; often associated with spiritual beliefs and cultural values. Proverbs such as ‘Taa bɛɛn Ubɔŋban daar’ (Don’t look for a dog on the day of hunting) underscores the significance of companionship as an attribute that pets embody in our society.
This cultural root significantly deepens the bonds between humans and their pets, reinforcing animals as a symbol of comfort.
Emotional boosters
In Ghana where mental health struggles are mostly stigmatised, pets offer judgment-free comfort. In Accra for instance, a number of households cherish dogs and cats hence nurturing bonds that transcend mere utility.
Pet ownership has grown as a natural way of promoting mental well-being and emotional support in times of personal or societal unrest, acting as silent witnesses and comforters.
Research from the American Psychological Association shows that interacting with pets lowers cortisol levels (stress hormone) while increasing serotonin and dopamine, chemicals linked to happiness.
The research indicates that Therapy dogs in hospitals, schools, and disaster zones provide comfort, proving that animals have an innate ability to soothe human anxiety and depression.
The use of therapy dogs as therapeutic agents helps in reducing aggressive behaviours, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress symptoms.
This suggest that animals provide a significant calming and therapeutic effect on patients with psychological disorders.
In an interview with a health expert at Nkwanta St Joseph Hospital, Doctor Emmanuel Mardo, said the use of trained therapy dogs was growing in the western part of the world due to health benefits on humans.
However, he noted that the use of these therapy dogs was rare in Africa. Even though most households have dogs or cat, these animals are there for security purposes and not as a companion.
“I’ve read about the benefits of therapy dogs in other countries like UK and America but it’s not a practice I know about here in our country,” Dr Mardo stated.
He acknowledged the potential benefits of such an initiative, stating that it could be very essential if implemented in our hospitals.
“Personally, I believe that it is a very good initiative and since it is working for other countries, it can equally work for us,” he added.
Physical health benefits
Having a pet encourages an active lifestyle. Dog owners, for instance, are more likely to meet daily exercise requirements through walks, which aid in reducing the risks of obesity and heart disease.
In an encounter with Mr Greg, an Australian dog owner in Osu-Accra, he shared benefits he derives from having a dog.
“Billy gives me the motivation to walk longer distances and yeah, his presence provides a sense of security for me. He deters potential threats and I don’t feel lonely when I’m taking a walk with him,” he noted.
The American Heart Association’s 2013 statement on pet ownership also links pet ownership to lower blood pressure and improve cardiovascular health. According to the statement, an increase in physical activity can lead to a 24 per cent reduction in the risk of early death.
Daily exercise lowers blood pressure and cholesterol levels and hence decreasing the risk of a heart disease.
Safety and security benefits
Pets play a significant role in enhancing security in various ways. They serve as a deterrent to potential intruders, protecting homes and properties from break-ins.
In an interview with Ms Faustina, a trader at Agbogbloshie, she shared her reasons for keeping multiple dogs around her property.
“I keep dogs because they protect my house. Whenever someone unfamiliar approaches, they bark and alert me,” she stated.
She also noted that the pets provide her with a sense of warmth and companionship, which helps her to alleviate feeling of loneliness as a single woman.
According to her, “Having pets around makes me feel less alone; they bring warmth to my life.”
Speaking with Mr Tayoume Kennedy Babuime, a Leading Fireman of the Ghana National Fire Service (GNFS), he also stated that dogs are used for operations such as search and rescue, detection of explosives and narcotics, and pursuit of suspects.
“Dogs are very important in our rescue operations. Their sense of smell enables us to locate people trapped in burning buildings or under debris. Especially, well trained sniffer dogs are the ones we mostly use in our operations because they have the ability to detect scents far stronger and quicker than humans which makes them more suitable for our search and rescue missions,” he explained.
Pets are far more than just animals we keep at home. They are therapists, fitness coaches and family.
In a country battling high fuel prices, political noise and endless stress, pets remind us to pause and reflect on what truly matters: love in its purest and furriest form.
Therefore, the next time you see a stray dog wagging its tail on Chorkor Road or a goat nuzzling a tail in Bawku, remember, these creatures are not just surviving Ghana’s chaos. They are saving us from it.
The writer is a Level 300 student of UniMAC, GIJ
By Cynthia Nnankorla Bikarl
The call to action
We must move beyond the cycle of temporary outrage. I propose a four-point blueprint for the Ministry of Health and the government:
1. A Digital Bed-Tracking Command Centre: Legally mandate all public and major private hospitals to update a live, digital bed-registry every hour. The NAS must be able to see a vacancy before they move. This must be matched with the available resources and services so that the right patient will be sent to the right facility.
2. Strategic Capacity Expansion: We must stop building “prestige projects” and start building high-volume stabilisation centres. We need a targeted investment to triple the ER bed count in Accra and Kumasi within 24 months. This should then be extended to other regional capitals.
3. Specialised Emergency Hubs: Designate specific hospitals as “Centres of Excellence” for Cardiac and Stroke care (and for other health emergencies), ensuring they have 24/7 imaging and intervention capabilities as well as the requisite expertise to manage these conditions. Policy makers must incentivise public-private partnerships to ensure that a heart attack in Accra or Kumasi can be treated with the same urgency as one in New York.
4. Develop a nationwide trauma system: This is extremely important because trauma is a major cause of deaths in Ghana. In the US, each state has a statewide trauma system with three levels. Level 1 trauma centres are usually University Teaching hospitals that provide comprehensive trauma care and also play an important role in local trauma system development, regional disaster planning, increasing capacity and advancing trauma care through research. Level II trauma centres are expected to provide initial definitive trauma care for a wide range of injuries and injury severity.
Level III centres provide definitive care to patients with mild trauma. Having such systems is imperative to ensure proper treatment of trauma patients.
Even for those who survive trauma, disability is a major assault on economic potential and viability. Importantly all this cannot happen with a cash and carry system. Emergencies should be managed under a different model to save life and limb first. Obviously, there is a need to ensure that healthcare facilities will be able to recover their investments in emergency care, and that balancing act needs careful consideration.
Frontline clinicians are often forced to bear the public’s anger for infrastructure deficits they did not create and cannot fix. This is a failure of governance, not a lack of clinical care. Responsibility lies with the policy makers who manage the nation’s resources.
The “No Bed Syndrome” is a systemic disease. It cannot be cured with a directive from the Ministry of Health, parliament or a lecture on ethics. It requires a blueprint, a budget, and the political will to treat this like the menacing threat it is.
It is safe to say that non-emergent healthcare is excellent in Ghana for the most part if you can afford it. However, emergency care is suboptimal. We had a sitting president die from an emergency health issue and a former vice president also die from an emergency. If that is not enough warning, it is clear that anyone can be a victim of an emergency.
If we do not act, the next ambulance driving aimlessly through the streets of Accra could be carrying anyone, including the very people who have the power to fix this issue.
Prof. Jonathan Laryea is a Professor of Surgery at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock. Arkansas. He is board certified in General Surgery, Colorectal Surgery and Clinic Informatics.
He is a graduate of the University of Ghana Medical School (Class of 1997)
Health Essentials
Why Ghana’s ‘no bed syndrome’ is a policy failure, not a clinical failure – Part one
OVER the years, No Bed Syndrome has been a major headache in Ghana’s health system. People have expressed different views and today my friend and classmate Professor Jonathan Laryea takes his turn and makes extremely important contributions that should start a deep conversation.
Professor Laryea writes;
Every few months, Ghana wakes up to a familiar, tragic headline. A prominent citizen, a pregnant mother, or a young accident victim has died in the back of an ambulance. They didn’t die because medical science failed them; they died because they spent their “Golden Hour”, the critical window between life and death, touring the gates of hospitals that had no room to receive them.
The public outcry follows a predictable script: anger at the hospitals, calls for “compassion” from doctors and nurses, and a frantic directive from the minister of health and parliament. A few years ago, the directive was simple: No hospital can turn a patient away. The result? We didn’t create more beds; we simply moved the crisis from the ambulance floor to the hospital floor. That also created another outrage.
It is time to stop blaming the frontline workers and start looking at the math. The “No Bed Syndrome” is not a failure of healthcare workers; it is a failure of a country that has not matched its resources to its population growth. Most recently, an engineer lost his life after being involved in an accident. The ambulance drove around for hours before getting to Korle Bu. Though the outcome was sad, I would venture to say that even if Korle Bu had a bed to treat this patient, the outcome would likely have been the same given the time between the accident and when the ambulance got to Korle Bu. When you have a patient exsanguinating, time is of the essence. Even if he got to the right place in time, the other question is would they have enough blood to resuscitate him without requiring family to donate prior to administering the blood?
The impossible equation
Consider the capital city. Accra has a population of approximately 2.9 – 4 million people, depending on who you ask. To serve this massive, high-density population, there are fewer than 400 dedicated emergency room beds across major public facilities.
Let’s do the math: that is roughly one emergency bed for every 10,000 citizens. That is not a recipe for success. When a system is constantly operating at 110 per cent capacity, “No Bed” isn’t an excuse, it is a physical reality. When we force doctors and nurses to treat patients on the floor, we aren’t “solving” the problem; we are compromising hygiene, dignity, and clinical outcomes. You cannot perform a high-quality resuscitation on a crowded floor. This is a capacity issue. We cannot expect this issue to fix itself. There is the need to increase emergency capacity across the metropolis and indeed across the country.
A system in need of coordination
The second failure is logistical. Ghana has made strides in developing a National Ambulance Service (NAS), but we have failed to give that service a “brain” to coordinate it. Currently, an ambulance driver picks up a patient and begins a desperate, manual search for a vacancy. They drive from Ridge Hospital to 37 Military Hospital to Korle-Bu, burning through the patient’s oxygen and time. In an era of digital transformation, it is inexcusable that our ambulances do not have a real-time, cloud-based dashboard showing exactly where the nearest available specialised bed is located. An ambulance without a coordinated dispatch system is just a high-speed hearse.
Beyond the furniture: The “emergency mindset”
A bed, however, is just a piece of furniture if it is not backed by an emergency pathway. The true “No Bed Syndrome” includes a lack of specialised systems. In modern medicine, the “Golden Hour” dictates that, for example:
• For a heart attack: We must be able to perform cardiac catheterization within 60 to 90 minutes.
• For a stroke: We must have the ability to perform a CT scan and administer clot-busting medication within an hour.
In Ghana, if you have a stroke or heart attack, your survival depends more on your luck and your traffic route than on a standardised medical protocol. If a patient reaches a bed but the CT scanner is broken or there is no Cardiac Catheterisation Laboratory or the Catheterisation laboratory is unstaffed/unresourced, the “syndrome” has simply moved from the ambulance to the ward. We have failed to develop the specialized “hubs” required to treat these time-sensitive killers. Accident cases are even worse. The ability to give blood emergently to exsanguinating patients does not exist. Some patients need immediate surgery; for example, patients with gunshot wounds and stab wounds. Sending such patients to a facility where they cannot do emergency surgery is unhelpful.
We must develop a system for triaging patients to the right facilities. There is a need to do a thorough evaluation of our healthcare delivery system and redesign a system that works for Ghanaians. It looks like we have done a patchwork of modifications to what Governor Guggisberg left us and after 69 years of self-governance, we have failed to redesign a system that works for modern-day realities.
Prof. Jonathan Laryea is a Professor of Surgery at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock, Arkansas. He is board certified in General Surgery, Colorectal Surgery and Clinical Informatics.
He is a graduate of the University of Ghana Medical School (Class of 1997).
