Be part of the success story - Donate blood to save lives

Yesterday’s issue of the Daily Graphic (April 28) carried two critical stories highlighting maternal mortality, causes of maternal deaths and the urgent need for planned and sustained  measures to improve quality of care to ensure survival and transformation for national development.

One of the stories, from the opening session of the annual review conference of the Family Health Division of the Ministry of Health (MoH) in Sunyani last Wednesday, indicated that pregnancy-related diseases claimed the lives of 1,033 women in 2016.

Even though the Director of Family Health of the MoH, Dr Patrick Kuma-Aboagye, who made the statement could not provide figures for 2015 when quizzed, he was quoted as stating that the 2016 figure was an increase over those recorded in 2015, and that maternal deaths had consistently increased in the teaching hospitals in the past three years, with the Greater Accra Region continuing to record the highest number of maternal deaths.

Awareness campaign

The second story was related to an initiative by the Greater Accra Regional Health Directorate of the Ghana Health Service (GHS) to embark on a campaign to create awareness of the problems of haemorrhage or bleeding during pregnancy and childbirth, as the major cause of maternal mortality, among other issues, and how to address them.

For this reason, the regional health directorate is embarking on a voluntary blood donation campaign to solicit for blood to be stored in some blood banks within the region to save the lives of women.

The first in the series is being organised in Accra and Tema on May Day.

 According to health experts, maternal death refers to the death of any woman that occurs during pregnancy, labour and six weeks after birth due to preventable factors, indicating that maternal death remained the best indicator of the quality of women’s health care worldwide.

Both stories mentioned excessive bleeding (haemorrhage) during pregnancy and childbirth as the major leading direct cause of maternal death with hypertensive disorders during pregnancy, which could lead to a condition known as pre-eclampsia or eclampsia, following closely as the second direct cause of maternal deaths in the country. Other conditions contributing to the problem are unsafe abortion, sepsis and prolonged labour.

Life-saving measures

According to a statement from the Greater Accra Regional Health Directorate of the GHS, some life-saving measures can be used to manage the situation and if the blood loss is so much, blood transfusion may be required, indicating that urgent blood transfusion is the single most effective treatment in this case.

This implies that the non-availability of blood at the blood bank could lead to many deaths which could have been prevented if there was enough blood in stock.

For this reason, the statement is appealing to all citizens of Ghana to cultivate the habit of donating blood voluntarily to stock the blood banks with enough safe blood that is readily available to help save lives.

The voluntary blood donation campaign dubbed ‘The Regional Bleeding Day’ is being organised by the health directorate on Monday, May 1 (May Day) at the Ridge Regional Hospital (the Maternity Pavilion and in Tema at the forecourt of the Tema Metropolitan Assembly (TMA);  The organisers have  appealed to Ghanaians to cultivate the habit of donating blood voluntarily to stock the blood banks with enough safe blood that is readily available to save lives.

The organisers are calling on the general public “to be part of the success story”, urging men and women between the ages of 17 and 60 who weigh 50 kilos or more to conveniently take part in the blood donation exercise.