Each of the hospitals to be constructed was estimated to cost between $5 and $7m and in total cost $707 million.
According to him, though, President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo disclosed in his eighth COVD-19 address to the nation to construct hospitals in some 88 districts across the country, the number had increased to 111 to make room for additions, including hospitals for the six new regions that had no regional hospitals and other places that were left out at the initial count.
He said "There are 88 districts in our country without district hospitals; we have six new regions without regional hospitals; we do not have infectious disease control centres dotted across the country and we do not have enough testing and isolation centres for diseases like coronavirus.
"We must do something urgently about this and that is why the government has decided to undertake such major investment in our healthcare infrastructure, the largest in our history."
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"We will, this year, begin constructing 88 hospitals in the districts that do not have hospitals," Agyeman-Manu said at the Appointments Committee during his vetting.
He stated that the cost of the construction has also gone up to make room for 13 additional hospitals.
He noted that "Mr. Chair, the initial costing was done on the basis of averages and we are looking at a cost between $5 million to $7 million per hospital.
"When the issue of equipment and other logistics come in, we still think that a maximum of $7 million can do what we have to do.
"The President had envisioned that the hospitals would be completed within the promised time and so he set up a committee including all the key stakeholders to start working on them. We asked all the districts to give us land for the construction of the hospitals.
"As I speak, we still have about 13 districts that have not completed the exercise of giving us site plans on the lands intended for the construction of the hospitals."