Pregnant women queue at Oda government hospital

Pregnant women in the Birim Central Municipality queue at the Oda Government Hospital theatre in order to access the facility.

Miss Anastasia Atiogbe, Birim Central Municipal Director of Health Services, disclosed this when the Ghana News Agency Media Auditing and Tracking of Development projects team paid a courtesy call on her at Oda.

She said averagely, the hospital recorded 4,112 antenatal cases in 2013, with 3801 of them delivered at the hospital while 311 deliveries were conducted by the traditional birth attendants (TBA).

She said the hospital recorded four maternal deaths in 2013, a situation which was worrying to the hospital's management.

Miss Atiogbne said the hospital theatre cannot take care of the number of pregnant women who come there daily to access the facility.

She said the multi-purpose theatre, which is about 90 years old, had not seen any expansion since it was built.

He said the small size room theatre served as changing room, scrub room, recovery ward, as well as operation theatre, which was not good enough, considering the number of patients on hand.

The Director said due to this, what doctors normally do is that, they take care of patients whose conditions are very critical first before attending to the others.

She said the theatre was outmoded, and the number of patients was too much for it, adding that, there were few beds in the maternity ward, with many pregnant women lying on the bare floor, a situation the Director of health described as dehumanizing.

Miss Atiogbe appealed for support to solve the problem at the theatre and the maternity ward in order to create a congenial atmosphere for pregnant women and other patients who visit the facility.

Miss Atiogbe enumerated a number of challenges confronting health delivery in the area which included inadequate vehicles and motorbikes for proper and frequent supervision, shortage of family planning commodities at the regional medical stores, affecting their family planning activities.

She said 39 positive tuberculosis (TB) cases were detected last year with treatment success rate of 82 per cent and malaria, a major disease in the area, recording significant reduction.

She said despite those challenges, management was determined to make the hospital one of the best in the country to provide quality curative and regenerative health care to the people of Birim Central and beyond through the use of modern, evidence-based methods of health delivery.