Gig for Ghana Fundraising for Friends of Ghana NGO

Gig for Ghana. Friends of Ghana NGO – Meeting the Wa Naa, or King, of the Wala in Ghana’s Upper West Region were some of the Friends of Ghana: Dr. Khalifa Elmusharaf, Senior Lecturer in Public Health at University of Limerick; Prof Fiona Murphy, Professor of Clinical Nursing, University of Limerick; Katie Sheehan, Assistant Director of Nursing, Croom Hospital; Kelly Hadfield, Founder of Ghana Medical Help and GEMS student; Prof Paul Finucane, chairman, Friends of Ghana; Harriet Burgess, GEMS student and Prof Des Leddin, Adjunct Clinical Professor, University of Limerick and Head of Gastroenterology, Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, Canada.

Gig for Ghana Fundraising for Friends of Ghana NGO

On Thursday, February 9 an incredible fundraising concert will feature a number of Irish folk musicians performing at the Strand Hotel.

Gig for Ghana. Gig for Ghana is fundraising for the Friends of Ghana NGO.

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In 2016 a partnership titled Friends of Ghana NGO was formed between UL Hospitals Group, the University of Limerick and the national health service of Ghana. This partnership initially focused on training primary healthcare staff in basic life-saving skills in the remote Upper West Region.

Friends of Ghana NGO operates as an independent NGO but UL Hospitals’ involvement, which has been ratified by the board, will see the realisation of the Group’s ambition to establish formal links in a developing country.

Kelly Hadfield, organiser of Gig for Ghana and founder of Friends of Ghana NGO, spoke about why she believes this organisation is so important “Minimising preventable deaths is what angers me the most and they are occurring every day in this region. This whole programme is about empowering locals to stop as many preventable deaths as possible. Right now, the healthcare workers who are the backbone of the service, the rural nurses at a pre-hospital community level, have zero training for basic resuscitation skills or for managing trauma. And this is where the Friends of Ghana can help”

All funds raised through Gig for Ghana will go directly to supporting Friends of Ghana NGO, the medical project in Ghana that empowers hundreds of rural and remote nurses to save lives and improve health outcomes for the most vulnerable. This partnership helps to develop an emergency medicine training program, involving a 4-day training conference in June 2017 that ‘trains the trainers’. The underlying principle is that nurses will be able to recognise and treat life-threatening emergencies across many causes, based on a model of ‘big sick’ / versus ‘little sick’.

The fundraising concert, which will kick off at 8 pm, will feature many famous Irish folk musicians such as Denis Ryan of Ryan’s Fancy, Norman Morrissey, Louise Morrissey, Denis Allen, Denis Carey, Nile St. James, Manus McGuire along with much more. This unique evening will also feature one-of-a-kind silent auction items available to win. Organisers of the event have tipped people off as to what some of these special auction items may be. ‘Uncle Chris’ – the Canadian astronaut who commanded the International Space Station while playing the guitar, may have donated a number of autographed goods to support the evening.  

Tickets for this concert cost as little as 25 euro and 15 euro for students, and are sold at GEMS reception at UL or Steamboat Music on Steamboat Quay, Limerick. Doors open at 8 pm, and anyone wanting to book a room at the Strand Hotel for the evening has a discounted rate available. 

Read more on Friends of Ghana here

Find out more on Limericks involvement here