Public urged to donate blood to reduce maternal deaths

Dr Kwame Anim-Boamah, Medical Director of the Eastern Regional Hospital, has called on Ghanaians to donate blood voluntarily to help reduce the incidence of maternal deaths in the country.

He said it has been established that the highest cause of maternal deaths is bleeding after delivery or hemorrhage and health facilities need a lot of blood available to save women from dying after delivery and related complications.

Dr Anim-Boamah said unless one has been medically declared unfit to donate blood, everybody has the capacity to donate blood and called on the public not to wait for their relatives to get into the situation of needing blood before going to donate.

He was speaking at a Regional health dialogue organized by the Star Ghana Foundation in collaboration with African Rights Initiative International and the Doctors in the Gap Project.

The event was held under the theme: “Ensuring Sustainable and Equitable Access to Quality health Services: Prospects and Challenges”.

Dr Anim-Boamah said equitable and quality healthcare thrived on the availability of logistics such as tools and equipments, medicines and supplies including blood and health personnel and stressed the need for government to invest more in health care services.

He said whiles logistics make the work easier for health workers, it also adds up to quality care which we all envisage and called on the public to also contribute their quota in the form of donating blood to complement the efforts of all other stakeholders.

Mr Yaw Bio, Afram Plains North District Director of Health Services, said the inability of the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA) to pay facilities claims on time was affecting the provision of quality health care services in especially the rural areas.

He said compared to years back, government and its partners invested in healthcare to ensure equitable access yet the challenge of logistics remained citing the CHPS scale up project which had provided many facilities at short intervals to improve accessibility for rural communities.

The Health Director said many of the CHPS compounds have challenges with logistics thereby making quality healthcare difficult adding that “ a lot of the CHPS facilities have no refrigerators to store vaccines and so some nurses in the Afram Plains area have to travel about six kilometers to get vaccines for immunization services”.