The high incidence of deaths among premature babies in the country can be halved if public hospitals in the country acquire adequate incubators and ventilators and make minor improvement to the system of child delivery.
The mortality rate for extreme premature babies in Ghana is 80 per cent while that of babies born with birth as phyxia annually is 20 per cent. Even though the case of extreme premature babies is precarious everywhere, experts say the high number of premature and other difficult birth cases in the country can be dramatically enhanced with some inexpensive measures.
Investigations conducted by The Finder revealed, for instance, that most public hospitals in the Greater Accra Region lacked ventilators for babies, hence babies with weak lungs stand great risk of dying.
Another challenge confronting the hospitals is the number of nurses who have to cater for premature babies at the intensive care units.
Ideally, it should be two nurses to a baby, but there are only seven nurses who attend to over 40 babies on shift basis.
According to a medical officer at one of the nation's top hospitals, most private hospitals also do not have incubators or ventilators to cater for the babies in such situations, which make babies die before they get to Korle Bu Teaching Hospital ( KBTH).
“Most of the babies die due to respiratory distress, and delay in bringing the babies to the hospital on time”, she said.
On a visit to the Ridge Hospital, The finder came across a scene where health workers struggled for about six hours to resuscitate the babies with respiratory problems, using manual means.
Even the long hours spent trying to resuscitate the new babies manually with an ambu-bag, which is a flexible reservoir bag connected by tubing and a non-re-breathing valve to a face mask, cannot guarantee the survival of that baby, a doctor told The Finder.
This, he said, is because the health worker cannot use an ambu-bag always. He said the spate of death would have reduced with the availability of ventilators, and in some cases incubators.
At the La and Police hospitals, premature babies and babies with breathing problems are transferred to the Ridge Hospital and Korle Bu since those institutions lack incubators.
A source at the Police Hospital said for 14 years, the hospital has no ventilators and incubators although it takes deliveries.
“I came to meet one incubator which was donated to the ward, but it has never been used because the brochure accompanying the incubator was written in German language”, the source said.
The Police Hospital managers with an ambu-bag, but babies with critical breathing problems are sent to Korle Bu or the Ridge hospital.
The La General Hospital handles between 5,000 and 7, 000 deliveries a year and estimates that 10 per cent of the babies delivered require specialized care, as a result of breathing problems.
The hospital, which had five incubators, now has only one functioning.
