Prime
Invest more to reduce mothers, babies deaths
No woman should die while giving birth. FILE PHOTO
What you need to know:
- The issue: Health
- Our view: We need to invest more in our healthcare facilities, particularly in rural areas, to ensure access to quality healthcare services.
- This will guarantee that emergency obstetric care is accessible to manage complications during childbirth.
In the recently released Uganda Demographic and Health Survey (UDHS) 2022 report, the number of mothers who died during pregnancy, delivery or 42 days after delivery stood at 189 deaths per 100,000 live births. An indication that around 2,800 mothers died out of an estimated one-and-half million births.
This 2022 figure is lower than 336 deaths per live 100,000 births previously reported in 2016.
However, the figure is still very high when compared to countries such as the United Kingdom, where only 10 women die of 100,000 live births. For infant mortality, the Uganda Bureau of Statistics researchers also discovered that there was a slight decline from 43 to 36 deaths per 1,000 live births in the past five years (between 2016 and 2022), a figure which is very high when compared to four deaths per 1,000 live births reported in Europe.
The same report indicates that under-five mortality has also dropped from 64 to 52 deaths per 1,000 live births. Dr Jane Ruth Aceng, the health minister, says the results indicate that there is progress made by the government in terms of addressing the health needs of the population. This is commendable but there is still more work ahead of us.
While the decline has been attributed to successful health programmes and increased hospital births, we need to invest more in our healthcare facilities, particularly in rural areas, to ensure access to quality healthcare services.
This will guarantee that emergency obstetric care is accessible to manage complications during childbirth. We also need to increase the number of well-trained and well-remunerated healthcare professionals, including doctors, nurses, and midwives, and ensure that healthcare facilities are adequately equipped with necessary medical supplies and equipment to see more significant drops in infant and mother mortality rates.
The promotion of early and regular prenatal care for expectant mothers to monitor their health and address potential complications like it has been done before is good but let us also encourage mothers to seek postnatal care for themselves and their newborns to detect and treat any health issues early.
The strategies are only possible with government commitment through sufficient funding. The health budget for the current financial year 2023/2024 was slashed to 6.5 percent from 7.2 percent in the previous financial year, away from the Abuja Declaration that recommends countries to allocate at least 15 percent of their annual budgets to the health sector. This small allocation eventually affects all health programmes.
Let us ensure political commitment in addressing this issue from the highest levels of government, in collaboration with all other stakeholders.
