The Deputy Minister of Health, Dr Grace Ayensu-Danquah, has called for the total support of all stakeholders in the health sector to tackle maternal mortality in the country.
She said the phenomenon could not be solved by the ministry alone and, therefore, required the input of all players in the sector.
The stakeholders, she mentioned, included development partners, traditional rulers, health workers and non-governmental organisations (NGOs).
Addressing medical superintendents of hospitals, directors of the Ghana Health Service (GHS) and other health staff in Kumasi in the Ashanti Region, Dr Ayensu-Danquah said, “If we are going to solve this recurring problem, it really must be a collective solution.
It must be a one-time solution so that we do not keep going back and forth in our quest to deal with it.”
Official visit
The minister was on a two-day official visit to the region as part of phase three of the Regional Ecosystem Assessment visits of the Maternal Mortality Action and Response Programme (MMARP).
The assessment is being undertaken by the Ministry of Health to develop a National Roadmap for Reducing Maternal Mortality in Ghana, and it is to identify gaps in maternal health service delivery, referral pathways, emergency obstetric care readiness, community-level barriers, and stakeholder commitments.
Dr Ayensu-Danquah said maternal mortality was the worst-performing health index among Ghana’s health indices, as currently, the country’s institutional deaths for 2025 were about 945.
“Maternal mortality index actually reflects the robustness of the health sector of a nation,” she said, adding that a lot had been done to deal with maternal deaths but the needed results were not being achieved.
She, therefore, called for a need to do something different on the ground to achieve a favourable outcome.
Diagnosis
Spelling out the differential diagnosis of the challenge, Dr Ayensu-Danquah said it was a result of the inability of health staff to really recognise high-risk patients at the primary care level and escalate the care to the appropriate level of care.
She said, for instance, that if a severely pregnant woman visited a health centre and was not identified and moved to a district hospital for specialised care and lost blood during delivery, it put her life at risk.
In a presentation, the Ashanti Regional Director of Health Services, Dr Fred Adomako-Boateng, said most of the deaths that occurred at Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital (KATH) created the impression that KATH was the source of the deaths.
He, however, explained that careful analysis of the trend revealed that 91.6 per cent of the deaths that were recorded at KATH were referrals from other facilities within and outside the region.
Dr Adomako-Boateng said KATH contributed 8.30 per cent to the total maternal deaths in the region while Christian Health Association of Ghana (CHAG) and Ghana Health Service (GHS) facilities, within and outside the region, contributed to the remaining percentages of deaths.
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