Established in 1998, Foundation of Orthopedics and Complex Spine (FOCOS) has performed more than three thousand complex surgeries and offered orthopedic care to more than 60,000 people in West Africa. The Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) has supported FOCOS’s work for more than 15 years, during which time major strides have been made in the quality of care available, including with the opening of FOCOS Orthopedic Hospital in Ghana in 2012.
SNF is supporting FOCOS in building a new rehabilitation center in Ghana that will provide lifesaving access to rehabilitation services and essential prosthetics and orthotics to many thousands of people. The new facility will serve as a regional center of excellence and train health care staff in best practices to help foster system-wide improvements across West Africa.
For the organization’s founder, FOCOS’s mission is personal, a response to the situation he faced growing up in Ghana. “Not many Ghanaian children born in the pre-independence era of Ghana lived to see their fifth birthday,” says Dr. Oheneba Boachie-Adjei. “Thousands of children, young men and women in Africa and other parts of the third world face such fates and miss out on opportunities and the dreams of their lives.” The new rehabilitation center represents the nonprofit’s latest effort to help ensure that lives, especially young lives, are not needlessly lost or stunted through lack of access to treatments that are readily available elsewhere.