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Authors
David, Akagwire https://orcid.org/0009-0002-6168-172X
Padi, Esther Terkour https://orcid.org/0009-0008-3316-7014
Abem, Vivian Kapio
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Article History
Received: 19 April 2025
Accepted: 10 August 2026
First Online: 18 August 2026
Declarations
Ethics approval and consent to participate: First off, written permission was obtained from the TTH Research Directorate with reference number TTH/R&D/SR/298 dated 16th October 2023. This permission letter was used to apply for ethical approval for the study and also copied to the departments of the hospital to enable the research work to proceed. Ethical approval was obtained from the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) before data collection. The ethical approval number CHRPE/AP/1021/23 dated 16th November, 2023. This ethical approval was valid for a year, between 16th November, 2023 to 15th November, 2024. The research adhered to the Declaration of Helsinki on which bases ethical approval was given. Find in supplementary file . Additionally, the permission letter from TTH R&D and the ethical approval was copied to the various departments of TTH to inform the departmental management. Anonymity was achieved by removing the names and hospital identification numbers of the patients during the cleaning of the data for analysis. They were initially included to enable easy identification of patients for cross checking of the data and for the second part of the study where phone call in-depth interview to ensure DAMA patients or relatives were actually interviewed.
Informed consent: There were no individual consent forms signed by DAMA patients since it was a retrospective study. The secondary data was exacted after ethical approval and permission was given. Nonetheless, verbal informed consent was obtained using supplementary file from the patients or their relatives who took part in the in-depth interviews via phone calls. Again, written informed consent using supplementary fie was acquired from health personnel who participated in the focused group discussion part of the study before the discussion could proceed.
Consent for publication: Not applicable.
Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests.
