Preventable maternal deaths: When anger is just not enough anymore
I’ve never seen anything like this before in a referral hospital. The condition here is unacceptable and something must be done urgently about it.” These were the words of a very disheartened former minister of health about one of the most strategically located health facilities in the country, the Tema General Hospital.
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Five years on, the situation is no different, so what is the excuse?
Situated in the once buzzing Light Industrial Area enclave of the Tema Metropolis, the Tema General Hospital has been serving the people in and around the area for over six decades. The facility, which was built in 1954 to cater for the health needs of workers who constructed the Tema Harbour, was later taken over by the government as a public healthcare facility.
The sprawling Tema Community, which used to be a success story of real estate in Ghana and West Africa, is now a pale shadow of its former self and so is its health system. Despite playing host to over 50 private health facilities, the geographical location of the hospital and the growing population rate has made it one of the busiest in the country.
The hospital serves numerous surrounding towns and villages in constituencies such as Klottey Korley, Ashaiman, Kpone-Katamanso, Ningo-Prampram, Sege, Shai Osudoku, Tema Central, Tema East and Tema West. And there lies the problem. Despite boasting world-class medical practitioners, Tema General Hospital is reeling under immense pressure from congestion. The hospital’s staff members, especially the maternal and newborn units, are suffocating under the burden of providing quality care for thousands of patients daily.
Even though this concern is well documented and belaboured, very little has been done to assuage the impact of the pressure on health workers and patients.
20 Maternal deaths in four months
In order to avoid regurgitating facts that are already well known, maternal mortality figures obtained between January and April 2015 indicate that 20 women died from pregnancy-related cases at the facility. That is an average of five maternal deaths per month. While many of the cases are caused by delayed referrals by peripheral health facilities, the congestion at the hospital makes it nearly impossible to provide quality basic and/or emergency obstetric and newborn care.
Additionally, 85 babies were born dead while 68 died in the first week of life. These statistics mean that over a hundred expectant women who went to the Tema General Hospital went home without their babies. How emotionally traumatic this can be!
On an unannounced visit to the facility one Tuesday morning, the nurses, midwives and doctors on duty were busy attending to heavily pregnant women, some of who were sitting on the walkways leading to the wards. This was simply because there were no beds. Many of these women, accompanied by their relatives, laid on the floor. In an adjoining ward, four women who had just been delivered of babies shared a bed with their four babies; a depressing sight to behold.
At the antenatal care unit, six midwives had to share two weighing scales while each of them attended to over 100 patients every day. Aside all these depressing visuals, poor infrastructure with major structural defects such as cracks and major leakages in the roof and protruding electrical wires are some of the visible dearth of the facility.
For most Ghanaians, the misplaced priority of governments and health managers
has become increasingly disheveling. Fortunately, there is hope. There is hope if the citizenry will settle for nothing less than proactive plans to address the conditions at the facility.
Budgetary allocation & promises
Over the years, governments have been involved with expanding health facilities across the country. These include the establishment of Community- based Health Planning and Services (CHPS) compounds in remote areas across the country. Even though key health installations have received some attention from government and its agencies, it is evident that much more needs to be done to save pregnant women from losing their lives needlessly.
In the 2013 Budget (page 170 and 171), the minister of finance announced that the maternity block of the Tema General Hospital, which had been abandoned since 2007, was among the “priority projects” for the year. This promise, however, never materialised as pregnant women were given a raw deal. In 2014, the minister of finance once again indicated: “The ministry will undertake the rehabilitation or expansion of various regional and district hospitals and polyclinics across the country. These will include… completion of 50 per cent new maternity facility and expansion of the Tema General Hospital…” Once again, the uncompleted maternity block remains untouched.
To aggravate the situation, the Ministry of Health has reduced the intake of midwives and nurses into public health facilities, placing a traumatic strain on the older generation of skilled birth attendants, most of whom have to battle with high blood pressure for the rest of their lives. A midwife who spoke to this writer and preferred to remain anonymous narrated an ordeal she went through when a pregnant woman was saved from imminent danger by a commercial bus driver who brought her to the hospital at night.
“She looked completely pale and there was no bed for her because the place was full. The midwives and nurses on duty had to improvise to make sure she survived. We try our best but that is all we can do. My colleagues and I are wornout,” she lamented. This midwife’s frustration is evident in the fact that health ministers and members of Parliament whose constituents visit the facility for healthcare services have made fruitless visits and countless promises which they have failed to redeem.
In the 2015 Budget, the government said: “We have vigorously embarked on the following infrastructure to expand access to health care in all parts of the country,” and goes on to list a number of facilities including a 600-bed University of Ghana Teaching Hospital and a 420-bed Ridge Hospital Expansion Project. What is conspicuously missing is the maternity block at the Tema General Hospital.
The question then is: ‘Why is government building a 600-bed facility when a major healthcare installation such as the Tema General Hospital, which has some of the best medical practitioners, is in dire straits and requires much less to provide quality obstetric care? How do we sleep at night?
Shame on our governments for failing Ghanaian women and newborns!
Shame on the managers of our health system!
Above all, shame on every Ghanaian for not being ‘angry’ enough!
The writer is a very angry citizen of Ghana
Writer’s e-mail :[email protected]
