The Daffiama-Bussie-Issa (DBI) District Directorate of Health Services has been lauded for its initiative to establish mobile laboratory services to ensure that pregnant women irrespective of their geographical location access quality healthcare.
The Upper West Regional Director of Health Services, Dr. Osei Kuffuor Afreh speaking at the 2018 Annual Upper West Regional Health Sector Performance Review at Wa was thrilled by the move of the health directorate to ensure that pregnant women in communities far from health facilities were still able to access the needed health care.
Dr. Kuffuor Afreh called on other districts and municipalities to emulate the ingenuity of the DBI health directorate.
Speaking to GBC’s Mark Smith in the sidelines of the review conference, the District Director of Health Services of DBI, Emmanuel Sanwouk explained that the mobile laboratory services was necessary to reach pregnant women due to the absence of a medical laboratory in the district.
“The district currently has no district hospital but as a policy of the Ghana Health Service, every [pregnant] woman is supposed to get their blood level checked at registration and at 36 weeks repeat it. Since it is a requirement for health indicators, we try to fulfill that requirement. But unfortunately, because we don’t have a hospital and so we don’t have a laboratory,” he said.
Mr. Sanwuok explained that pregnant women therefore have to travel long distances out of the district to get their blood tests done; a huge inconvenience to them saying “when a women is to be checked for HB at registration or age 36 weeks, this woman is referred to Nadowli, Jirapa or the Upper West Regional Hospital and these are quite long distances.”
He added that since the pregnant women are not able to get the result for their blood tests on the same dates, they have to sleep in the hospitals at inconvenient places so they could get their results the following day.
These are some of the reasons that according to Mr. Sanwuok necessitated the establishment of the mobile laboratory services.
The health directorate partnered with a private health service provider to visit the various communities and do blood tests for pregnant women for what Mr. Sanwuok termed as a “small token considering that it is not enough for the work they do.”
The results are then returned to the pregnant women in their communities thereby reducing the stress involved in traveling from one district to another.
Part of the cost of the blood test has been absorbed by the DBI Directorate of Health Services to ensure that all the pregnant women can afford the service.
Mr. Sanwuok said he was however, unsure of the sustainability of the module because “when funds come, the older districts already have their structures in place so it is easier for them to implement most activities. In our case, when we receive the funding, there are a lot of competing needs. The staff have no accommodation; we do not have enough logistics and a whole lot of other issues and so you are caught up in-between trying to correctly place the little that comes to you.”
The District Director of Health Services for DBI appealed to well-meaning individuals and organisations to go to their aid so that they can better support pregnant women in the DBI district.
Story by Mark Smith
