Women, especially expectant mothers, have been advised to learn about pregnancy issues as a measure to help reduce the high mortality in the country.
Ms Ruth Sally Kodam, a Senior Midwifery Officer at the Tema General Hospital, in an interview with the Ghana News Agency in Tema said empowering women with the right information about pregnancy was one of the best ways to curb the deaths among pregnant women.
Ms Kodam, who is popularly known as Midwife Sally on various social media platforms for her activities towards the reduction in maternal mortality, said as a nurse, she had limited knowledge about pregnancy and had to read and research to prepare her for the task ahead.
“As a nurse, when I got pregnant, I realized that I didn’t know much about pregnancy, and therefore had to begin reading around to equip myself, that was when I came to the realisation that the high rate of maternal deaths was due to lack of information among the women,” she stated.
She said, the developed country was once faced with such maternal deaths, but they took steps to educate their women, therefore there was the need for authority to talk about pregnancy while the women also make efforts in getting the needed information for themselves.
She stressed that it was a must for pregnant women to sign up for pregnancy schools, adding that, if their antenatal clinics did not organise one, they should seek information online and read books on their conditions.
Ms Kodam said it was sad that most pregnant women got to know of caesarean sections, preeclampsia, and other pregnancy-related issues when it happened to them making it difficult for them to process it.
She said some pregnant women, because of the lack of knowledge, would wait for days after their “water has broken” before reporting to the hospital a situation that increases their risk of death.
“I have been to a village for a donation programme, where I interacted with three pregnant women; one of them was having severe preeclampsia (high blood pressure in pregnancy), another had her water broken for three days, and the third one was anaemic,” she said.
She said the women would have known what to do if they had received the required information and added that infrastructure might be a problem in most hospitals, but in terms of handling pregnant women but empowering the women with education would also reduce their risk of having complications in pregnancy.
She advised men to encourage their pregnant partners to participate in pregnancy schools saying that “if it was possible the men must also attend with them as according to her in some cases it was the men who informed the doctors about issues being faced by their women.”
The midwife said some of the topics treated at the pregnancy school were blood pressure, pregnancy topics, personal hygiene and danger signs in pregnancy, labour signs and its stages, childbirth, care for children, breastfeeding, family planning, and circumcision, among others.
