Let's all fight maternal deaths
Oct 19, 2012
On January 11, 2012, I received a call at 3:00pm summoning me to hospital where my elder sister had checked in to have her sixth baby.
By Rukia N. Mbaziira
On January 11, 2012, I received a call at 3:00pm summoning me to hospital where my elder sister had checked in to have her sixth baby.
The voice on the other side of the phone sounded anxious and within 20 minutes, I was at the hospital. However, I was greeted with wails and tears. I could not believe it. My sister whom I had just spoken to four hours earlier was no more. She was dead.
She had delivered a bouncing baby boy but had haemorrhaged so badly that not even the efforts of the doctors could save her.
Her labour pains started at 11:00am, was in the health facility at 12:00, had a normal delivery as 2:00pm and died at 3:47pm. In the prime of her life, with six children (who now face the sad reality of growing up minus their mother), death had claimed my sister.
She was part of the statistics of 16 women who daily succumb to death during childbirth in Uganda.
Later, as we lowered her casket into the grave, I could not stop looking at her two-year-old daughter playing innocently with her age-mates and wondering what the future beheld for this young soul.
That is not to mention the one-day old baby, who now would never know the sweetness of a mother’s breast let alone love. It is nine months now, my six nephews and nieces are growing up but with no mother to raise them.
As we mark Safe Motherhood Day, I could not help but reflect on these sad events. Research has shown a number of factors that contribute to maternal and perinatal deaths in Uganda are preventable.
These are mainly limited infrastructure in our public health facilities, poor access to emergency obstetric care, inadequate supplies and equipment, low awareness on danger signs in pregnancy, high fertility rate leading to too frequent and too many pregnancies, the unmet needs for family planning and the three delays to accessing health care at community and facility level.
Mothers usually delay to seek care, delay to reach the health facility and also delay to access quality health care services at the hospital.
The Ministry of Health and partners have re-energised their efforts in addressing these killer issues and there is hope that more lives will be saved so that families do not go through what my family went through.
The ministry has intensified awareness creation campaigns on safe motherhood practices, recruiting and retaining health workers, improving the delivery of drugs and health supplies, procuring of necessary equipment and renovation of health facilities throughout the country.
As we mark this day, my prayer is that no one goes through what we experienced on January 11. My appeal is we should observe the following practices to help fight this preventable cause of death among women: All pregnant mothers must attend at least four antenatal visits so that complications are identified and managed to avoid complications during delivery and thereafter; all pregnant mothers should deliver babies under skilled care of a midwife or doctor and couples should also embrace family planning.
Ministry of Health