70% women deliver on Tema Hospital floor

• Posted on August 26, 2014August 26, 2014
• by Nana Kwesi Coomson
• Comment

About 70% of women in labour deliver on the floor of the Tema General Hospital (TGH) due to the lack of space in the facility’s maternity ward as well as the severe lack of beds for the expectant mothers.

A source at the hospital told The Finder that three mothers share one bed after delivery.

Health personnel at the facility said between 40 to 50 deliveries are recorded every day.

The situation is so worrying that some pregnant women are forced to deliver on benches that are positioned for guests who call on the ward to visit their patients.

Some pregnant women who are due to deliver, as a result of the stress they have to go through all the time, either lose their babies or die at the end.

Mothers with babies are made to share one bed while those in labour sit on benches waiting for some of their colleagues to be discharged.

Conditions at the hospital are aggravating day after day as a result of the growing population in the Tema metropolis.

Government started the construction of a new storey maternity block for the hospital during the administration of the late President John Evans Atta Mills.

It is designed to have four 20-bed labour wards, a postnatal ward that would contain between 80 and 100 beds, a neonatal intensive care unit that would contain 20 cots and eight incubators, a two-table theatre, and 10 private wards.

Sadly, the project has been abandoned for the past four years.

Staff of the hospital appealed to the Greater Accra Regional Minister, Joseph Nii Laryea Afotey-Agbo, to fulfil his promise of seeing to the completion of the project.

-The Finder