Kwabena Frimpong-Boateng

Kwabena Frimpong-Boateng (born 1949) is a Ghanaian physician and cardiothoracic surgeon who established the National Cardiothoracic Centre in Accra. He took his MB ChB at the University of Ghana Medical School in 1975, finishing as the best candidate in the final examination and winning the Easmon Prize for surgery. In 1978 he went to Germany and spent about ten years at Hannover Medical School, where he specialised in cardiothoracic surgery and was one of the pioneers of the heart transplantation programme. He returned to Ghana as its first locally based cardiothoracic surgeon and set up the National Cardiothoracic Centre at the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital in 1992, where he performed the first open-heart operation in Ghana using a heart-lung machine. The centre is recognised by the West African College of Surgeons for training heart surgeons and related staff. He founded the Ghana Heart Foundation to help patients who cannot afford heart surgery, became a full professor at the University of Ghana Medical School in 2002 and chief executive officer of Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital the same year, and was later Ghana's minister for environment and natural resources from 2017 to 2021.