Midwives use mobile phones, candlelight to aid deliveries

Midwives and nurses at the Fomena Health Centre have been depending on mobile phones and candlelight to assist women in labour to deliver their babies.

This is because the centre has no standby generator and whenever there is a power outage, the health workers are forced to improvise.

The acting Medical Director of the centre, Mr Isaac Odame Awuku, disclosed this when a team from mobile telecommunications company MTN, which provided a maternity ward for the health centre, visited the facility.

Mr Awuku said the method, though unconventional, was an indication of the staff’s commitment to work, even in the face of the national power crisis.

He stressed that the power crisis had had a serious effect on the running of the health centre because it had no standby generator to power its equipment.

Mr Awuku, therefore, appealed to corporate Ghana and benevolent organisations to help the centre acquire a generator to help it improve on its health care delivery in the area.

Maternal deaths

That notwithstanding, Mr Awuku said the centre had not recorded any maternal death in the past three years.

He said the centre recorded, on the average, 400 births per annum.

In 2013, Mr Awuku said, 389 deliveries were recorded at the facility, while in 2014, there were 386.

In the first quarter of this year, he said, there were 97 deliveries at the health centre.

Purpose of visit

The Corporate Service Manager of MTN, Mrs Georgina Asare Fiagbenu, said as part of the company's policy, it regularly visited the social infrastructure it had helped to build to find out how they were being maintained.

Thus, the visit was to find out if the maternity ward was serving its purpose and also earn some of the challenges the centre was facing.

She commended the nurses and midwives at the centre for their hard work and dedication to work.