Accra: On the night of 6th February 2026, Charles Amissah, a 29-year-old engineer with Promasidor Ghana Limited, was knocked down 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, he was carried, alive, to the Police Hospital, the Greater Accra Regional Hospital (Ridge), and the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital. 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 the death avoidable, caused by medical neglect and not by trauma. The harder question is what those one hundred and eighteen minutes tell us about the country.
According to Ghana Web, the timeline is now public, reconstructed from the National Ambulance Service's Situational Report and confirmed by the Akosa Committee. At 22:32, a call was received, and an ambulance was dispatched. By 22:35, the crew was on-site, managing the bleeding and applying necessary medical interventions. Despite their efforts, Amissah faced rejection at multiple hospitals, resulting in a tragic loss of life by midnight.
In none of those minutes did a single doctor or nurse at any of the three flagship public hospitals walk to the ambulance bay to take a pulse, examine the wound, or transfuse a unit of blood. Mr. Amissah, in the words of Prof. Akosa, was alive at every one of these facilities. He 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 pathological finding, was treatable.
The Amissah case unfolded in Accra, where the country's medical resources are most concentrated. Outside the capital, the picture is harder. The system, particularly in the Western Region, is struggling, lacking essential facilities like Intensive Care Units (ICUs), leaving critical care dependent on unfortunate circumstances such as the timing of another patient's death to secure a bed.
Amissah's wound required basic pre-hospital trauma care, which was not administered due to inadequate training of Emergency Medical Technicians who were described as mere couriers by Prof. Akosa. The institutions involved have faced little to no accountability, with Korle Bu interdicting four staff but remaining silent about their identities, while the Police Hospital and Ridge Hospital have yet to make any public acknowledgment or take action.
The case demands urgent reform in Ghana's emergency-care system, including the establishment of a national electronic emergency-bed coordination system, a statutory duty of patient stabilization, and the setup of functional ICUs in every region. Additionally, there is a call for the proper training of Emergency Medical Technicians and a public investigation into the hit-and-run driver.
Charles Amissah's death at 29 is a stark reminder of a failing system. The time for change is now, to prevent the next avoidable tragedy. The system's negligence turned a treatable injury into a death sentence, highlighting a dire need for reform. The question remains: Who killed Charles Amissah? The answer is a collective societal failure to address systemic issues within emergency care.