Ranking Member on Parliament's Economy and Development Committee, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, has raised concerns over worsening health sector indicators, citing rising neonatal mortality and delays in ambulance response times.

The concerns are contained in the 2025 Annual Progress Report.

According to him, the report underscores the need for greater accountability from Ministries, Departments, and Agencies (MDAs), urging them to provide transparent, accurate, and verifiable accounts of how public funds have been utilised and the outcomes achieved.

Speaking on the work of the Economy and Development Committee, Mr Oppong Nkrumah said Ghanaians are increasingly interested in the tangible impact of public expenditure rather than simply identifying cases of financial misapplication.

"The people of Ghana are not just interested in who has misapplied or applied some money in a particular way that you get at the Public Accounts Committee," he said.

"They want to also see what the targets are that we have set for ourselves as a country, what the money has done in terms of fulfilling those targets."

He explained that one of the committee's key responsibilities is to assess whether government spending is translating into measurable improvements in national development indicators.

Using the health sector as an example, the former Information Minister said the committee's recent hearing revealed that neonatal mortality is increasing despite public funds being allocated to reduce infant deaths.

"In the last health hearing that we had, neonatal mortality is getting worse in Ghana. It's in the report. This is the committee where they have to come and answer questions for when you took the money to go and reduce neonatal mortality: have you succeeded or have you failed?" he stated.

Mr Oppong Nkrumah also pointed to worsening ambulance response times, attributing part of the problem to the absence of a dedicated budget for operating the National Ambulance Service.

"Ambulance response times are getting worse. So what is the reason? And then we are finding out that there's no dedicated budget for the running of the ambulance service. So this is where now you can make those interventions for development," he said.

He further noted that Ghana currently lacks a national benchmark for outpatient department (OPD) response times, making it difficult to assess and improve service delivery in hospitals.

"We also just found out that in Ghana, we don't have a benchmark for what you call OPD response times. You hear people complaining that I go to the hospital, I sit there for one hour, and nobody has attended to me," he said.

"This is the committee where we work with the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC) and the ministries to set a target for OPD response time, for example, in the area of health, so that now we can measure it year on year, whether it's getting better or it's getting worse."

Mr Oppong Nkrumah said the committee would scrutinise the 2025 development report across the various sectors and invite ministers and their chief executives to public hearings to account for their performance against the targets set for their respective sectors.