MamaYe Ghana launches booklet on maternal health
Maternal mortality is the death of a woman while pregnant or within 42 days of termination of pregnancy, from any cause related to or aggravated by the pregnancy or its management, but not from accidental or incidental causes.
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Neonatal mortality is the death of a child who is born alive, but dies within the first 28 days of life.
The role of media practitioners in reporting more accurately on maternal and neonatal health is necessary, in support of sustained public education campaign on the issue.
In this regard, MamaYe Ghana, an organisation that promotes maternal and child health, has launched a 30-page booklet in Accra to enlighten media practitioners appropriately on key definitions of technical terminologies which journalists must understand in order to be able to report on the issues related to maternal and neonatal health.
A Senior Lecturer at the University of Ghana, Professor Audrey Gadzekpo, who launched the booklet, encouraged journalists to focus their radar on maternal and neonatal health, as available evidence indicated that Ghana was still far from achieving desired results as far as the subject was concerned.
Statistics
The maternal and newborn health facts sheet provided by the MamaYe team indicates that at least 2,700 mothers could be saved every year when given access to safe clinics and skilled care.
The Country Director for Evidence for Action, Professor Richard Adanu, stated that currently, 63 newborns died daily during childbirth. The trend could, however, be reversed with the right approaches.
Haemorrhage, defined by the MamaYe dictionary as ‘the loss of blood following a delivery, causing the patient to become symptomatic,’ is the most common cause of maternal death worldwide, and in Ghana it is the single largest direct cause of death, accounting for 24.3 per cent of maternal deaths in 2007.
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Other causes of maternal deaths include abortion, 11 per cent; hypertensive disorders (eclampsia), nine per cent; miscarriage, four per cent; sepsis, seven per cent; obstructed labour, four per cent; miscellaneous 13 per cent, and other not classified, non-infectious factors, 13 per cent.
Professor Adanu said the lives of mothers could be saved through an injection that helped the uterus to contract quickly after delivery.
He explained that during childbirth, blood circulation to the uterus per minute is 700 millimeters and so if haemorrhage was not controlled, the new mother could die in seven minutes, having lost about seven litres of blood.