The First Lady Rebecca Akufo-Addo will today [Friday] January 19, 2018 commission the new Maternity Unit as well as a Mother and Baby Unit (MBU) for the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital (KATH) at Kumasi in the Ashanti Region
The building, which cost some GHc10 million generated from public fundraising and donations, is expected to help reduce congestion and current deaths reported daily at the facility.
Available records show that a newborn baby dies every fifteen minutes with four babies dying every hour at the country’s biggest referral hospital for people in the northern part of the country.
But the new unit, which has over 15 incubators and 3 emergency wards, will allow KATH take in four times the current number of infants and mothers and reduce avoidable deaths by 60-80%.
Mrs. Rebecca Akufo-Addo who cut the sod for the construction of facility in May 2017 has been raising funds towards the project together The Multimedia Group Limited.
The project now houses the Maternity, Neonatal and Pediatric Intensive Care units at Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital.
More urgency needed to end maternal mortality
Mrs. Akufo-Addo had earlier bemoaned the continuous death of women and children during childbirth worldwide, especially Ghana.
The First Lady, while speaking at a Campaign on Accelerated Reduction of Maternal Mortality in Africa (CARMMA), described the situation as not only worrying but unacceptable.
“Ghana could not achieve its millennium development goal target of 185 per 100,000 live births; we achieved 319 per 100,000 live births at the end of 2015. Given that the new sustainable development goal target is to achieve 70 per 100,000 live births by the end of 2030, we need to work with urgency,” she added.
Source: www.dailyviewgh.com / Ghana
