Ghana 2026

Part 7: Week 5-7

We wanted to try some community health this week and had been placed at the Health Centre down the road. This is a primary care centre so similar to GP. We spent some time in the family planning clinic and some in the child welfare clinic. They do have a small room for deliveries and a pharmacy but that seems to be it.

The family planning clinic gets many women coming for contraception. It is similar to the UK except the room has space for 3 nurses and a couple patients at once.

The child welfare clinic is a clinic which mainly does vaccinations. The vaccination schedule for children is similar here except they get yellow fever too and some of the timings are slightly different. They also don’t give mumps as part of the MMR vaccine (measles, mumps, rubella).

After the days spent here I became unwell and ended up in hospital. I missed our weekend trip to Cape Coast but recovered fairly quickly over a few days.

The following week I spent one morning in labour ward but nothing new apart from that. The labour ward is small with 6 beds. They had only one patient while I was there and in the 15 minutes we’d stepped out the room she had given birth. (Despite only being 6-7cm dilated at the time)

We spent the weekend of week 6 back at Kokrobite for a relaxed weekend. We got to see the Saturday night reggae event that they do weekly. The starting hour was more circus-vibes than reggae but it was really impressive with men juggling and standing on top of each other – At one point there were three levels of people with the top gentleman doing a handstand with his hands on 2 peoples heads.

We also tried food elsewhere and had some lovely food at a place down the road owned by some Italians. The pizza was almost normal and definitely the best so far. The other food we tried was across the road but this was very spicy.

The following week has been spent on labour ward and in theatre. It has been more relaxed with sorting out our sign-offs.

We also got some dresses made from some Ghanaian fabric. The fabric cost 60 GHS and the dresses 250 GHS each (in total it was about £20). Below is a quick photo we took as we were all really too hot and sweaty to be trying on dresses.