Maternal and Child Health Improves in Sekyere East

Increased access to quality maternal and neonatal services in the Sekyere East District has led to zero death of mothers and new-born babies for last three years running.

Mrs. Dorothy Afuakwaw, the District Health Director, spoke of supervised skilled delivery, outreach services and regular household visits and said these had paid off.

She was speaking at the annual performance review meeting of the health directorate held at Effiduase.

The goal was to critically examine the progress, the challenges and the way forward to ensure a healthy and productive population.

She indicated that abortion was on a downward trend in the area and said a total of 61 cases were seen last year, compared with the 2016 total of 98.

At the same time, family planning acceptance shot up to 402 from 317.

Mrs. Afuakwaw touched on the significant improvement of maternal and child nutrition and attributed this to nutrition intervention programmes introduced by World Vision Ghana.

She pledged to focus priority on strengthening the collaboration with stakeholders and Community-based Health Planning and Services (CHPS) implementation.

She used the occasion to appeal to the district assembly to help build more CHPS Compounds to bring quality healthcare to closer to everybody.

The district has three completed CHPS Compounds but only one is functional. In all, there are 29 CHPS demarcated zones in the area.

Mrs. Afuakwaw complained about inadequate residential accommodation and frequent breakdown of the directorate’s motorbikes and asked that these were tackled.

She encouraged the health workers to continue to stick to professional ethics, show love and passion for the job, to bring healing to the sick.

Source: GNA