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Strategic measures apace to tackle maternal mortality – Health Minister
– training of midwives a priority
Although it has remained constant for the past two years, maternal mortality is still a very troubling situation
Minister of Health,
Dr Bheri Ramsaran
for the Ministry of Health. This is in spite of disclosures by Minister of Health, Dr Bheri Ramsaran, that the health goals in Guyana have more or less been achieved.
This therefore translates to Guyana achieving the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) Five which speaks to improving maternal health.
The Minister, during an interview with this publication, in making reference to the 18 maternal deaths that were recorded for both 2013 and 2014, said that “sometimes we are in a fragile situation because of the small numbers.”
He insisted too that “maternal mortality has over the few years been dropping significantly but whenever you crunch small numbers you can get a disproportionate shift to the negative. So we are happy that our maternal mortality rates are dropping.”
At a recent press briefing, Cabinet Secretary, Dr Roger Luncheon, in commenting on the maternal mortality situation as at last year, said that 10 of the 18 maternal deaths were recorded at the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation. The others, he revealed, were recorded at other public and private facilities.
But while the numbers are not worrying, the Cabinet Secretary did emphasise the need for reporting compliance of private institutions and went on to point out that Cabinet was concerned that these facilities were not recorded in a timely manner as prescribed by law.
And even as private institutions are being urged to be compliant, Minister Ramsaran intimated that certain measures are being taken with a view of helping to further reduce the number of maternal deaths.
But the focus, according to him, will not only be on the number of mothers who have unfortunately died in childbirth, but also bettering certain other support services such as the availability of blood as well. Last year a record 11,000 plus units of blood were garnered by the National Blood Transfusion Service to help cater to this need, according to the Health Minister.
But in addition to this, he noted that the Ministry is directing increasing attention on the training of requisite personnel. In fact he disclosed that there is set to be a significant upgrade of in-house training of midwives, for instance.
“Only two weeks ago we had a meeting with one of our strategic partners to have consorted training of midwives. So you will not just have a nurse dressed as a midwife going to deliver services; they will have to be trained as midwives and each midwife will have to have continuous upgrade which will be obligatory as part of our service obligation,” asserted the Health Minister.
The intent of putting strategic measures in place, according to the Minister, is to cater to reduce the challenges in the sector which will be complemented by the availability of more diagnostic tools so that “we will be able to identify mother in distress and foetuses in the womb that are in distress long before the delivery period is established.”
In addition, the Minister said that high risk clinics within the public health system are being upgraded and are likely to be furnished with a number of trained doctors. According to Dr Ramsaran, with the introduction of locally administered post-graduate programmes, a number of doctors drawn from some 500 trained in Cuba, will be trained to specialise in the area of Obstetrics and Gynaecology and a number of other areas as the efforts are made to expand the services offered.
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