Twenty-five thousand eight hundred (25,800) stillbirth and neonatal deaths have been recorded in Ghana in the last three years.
Senior Lecturer at School of Public Health, University of Ghana also an Epidemiology and Disease Control Doctor of Medicine, Dr. Alexander Manu revealed this during a presentation on “Assessment of Newborn Care in Ghana”, at the 10th Annual Newborn Stakeholders’ Conference held in Koforidua under the theme “Accelerating Newborn Survival and Wellbeing: Massive Scale – Up of Key Interventions for Impact”.
He said intrapartum related causes (asphyxia), together with preterm birth and infection account for 90 out of every 100 deaths recorded.
Dr. Alexander Manu also attributed the high stillbirth and neonatal mortality in the country to institutional challenges such as apparent shift of interest in newborn health demonstrated by posture of managers at various levels, Poor adherence to policies and protocols ,early initiation of breastfeeding, aggressive marketing and promotion of breast milk substitute, inadequate infrastructure and equipments, frequent rotation of trained personnels and many and most importantly inadequate neonatologists in the country.
Dr. Manu said there is a deficit in the number of neonatologist as data collected from the 143 out of 261 districts indicates that there was only one neonatologist from 2019 to 2021.
The Director General of Ghana Health Service Dr. Patrick Kuma Aboagye revealed that the greatest challenge contributing to neonatal death in Ghana is inadequate access to healthcare particularly in the rural areas.
Dr. Kuma Aboagye further stated that even though the current records indicates that in 2017 the new born deaths dropped from 43 per 1,000 births to about 25 per 1,000 births , the Ghana Health Service is yet to come out with another survey probably in next year to access the current situation.
He said “one of our greatest challenges is access to health care especially in the rural areas ,in the hard to reach areas in the country, the disease that affects children and new born babies is in Accra, is in the village , is in the hard to reach and the over banks river areas so what we are trying to look at is how do we reach them with the few expertise and equipment we have”.
He stated that Ghana Health Service will soon introduce an ICT- based client care next year to be able to reach pregnant women at the rural areas who do not have access to health care Services.
“To be able to reach them even at that far distance , we are going to introduce a technology which is an ICT- based customer care not for the rich but for the poor to ensure that we create access for them to improve quality of care and that will be a faster way of making us to reach more of our new borns and pregnant women within the resources that we have now” he said.
Meanwhile, the Eastern Regional Director of Health Dr. Winfred Ofosu is worried over lack of of neonatologist in the region this he said is making it more difficult to reduce neonatal mortality in the region .
“we don’t have any neonatologist in the Eastern region even though we have paediatricians so that is the aspect of human including the neonatal nurses, we don’t have them so this forms a gab as far as caring newborn babies is concern, and also there is issues of infrastructure , equipments like incubators and some kangaroo mother care a space where the mothers will rest but never the less, within these challenges the health care workers are making some good efforts”.Dr Winfred Ofosu said.
He also indicated in 2021 the neonatal mortality in the Eastern region was 6.7 per thousand live birth a reduction from 8.2 percent in 2020
