The Administrator of the Kwesimintsim Hospital, Felix Osei Kesse, has given chilling and a rather heart-wrenching account of how mothers with their minutes-old babies have to be treated on floors due to dire challenge with space at the hospital.
According to him, due to lack of space, pregnant women who give birth are immediately transferred onto mattresses on the floor to create space for other expecting mothers to be attended to.
“Because a good number of the pregnant women come from far, what we do is that we ask ourselves what we can do despite the challenges to save the mother and the unborn baby.
“Because some of these pregnant women come from maybe Mpohor and have travelled on rough roads, some have trekked long distances and are already suffering. . .what we do is that, we transfer a mother who is already on admission and has given birth to the floor bed where we have arranged mattresses. Then we will give the bed to the person who just came and sometimes in labour.”
He continued: “We do this because should we turn away that woman who had come from far, who is sometimes already in labour to go somewhere else because we are challenged, that decision to turn her away may be disastrous to the pregnant woman and her unborn child. So we have some beds on the corridor and we work with those.”
He related the sad story to host of Connect FM’s morning show Omanbapa Nhyiraba Paa Kwesi Simpson on the Wednesday January 19, 2022 edition.
According to Mr. Osei Kesse, the pressure on their labour block is overwhelming and fears for the worse should the situation remain unattended to.
“If you look at our labour ward, the cases are simply overwhelming to the extent that sometimes our weekly labour cases surpass that of Effia Nkwanta Regional hospital. Just look at Effia Nkwanta and look at us. So imagine what we can do if we have space. We have 82 nurses at the labour unit.”
Mr. Osei Kesse indicated that when the hospital was upgraded from a polyclinic into a hospital, it was only the name that changed and not with any accompanying infrastructure upgrade.
“With the upgrade we had to also introduce new services. So we have eye clinic, dental clinic, ENT, health promotion, disease control, nutrition, mental health among others. So ask yourself where we will get space for these new services to operate. So, for example, if you take the eye clinic, we have to go to the dental clinic and divide the place to be able to accommodate the eye people. If it is disease control, we go to ANC to divide the place, forgetting that the ANC clients are increasing by the day. And we do division and conversion all over. So these are accounting for the infrastructure challenges.”
He added that there is no Accident and Emergency block at the hospital, pointing out that “our makeshift children’s ward can only accommodate eight cots”.
“We also don’t have a dedicated children’s block. What we have done is that we have divided the female ward and are using it to serve the children. Sadly, the place can accommodate only eight cots. So if all the eight cots are occupied, we have to refer any new case. Mind you we have the needed personnel to take care of any case. So we refer them not because we cannot take care of them but simply because there is no space. And for our makeshift accident and emergency place which is a converted old treatment room, we have only three beds.”
The Administrator revealed that there has been strenuous efforts to get government to come to their aid but the situation remains the same.
“The First Lady has been here. The Deputy Health Minister has been here. The regional minister, MCE, MPs and all the high and might you can think of. But our infrastructure situation is the same. However, it is the MP for Kwesimintsim, Dr. Prince Hamid Armah, who I will applaud. He has been supporting us.”
By Eric Yaw Adjei|Connect FM|3news.com|Ghana