By Fatoumata Manneh
Brikama District Hospital’s maternal ward currently facing a shortage of basic equipment needed to help women undergo labour.
Patients attending public health care centres in the country often complain lack of proper care, attention, and medication in the country’s health system.
Cicilia Mendy, the head of the Maternal Unit at the BrikamaDistrict Hospital, lamented difficulties staff encountered when working.
“We lack a lot of materials as we speak, and that’s a big challenge. Every hospital that you go to right now is working on conditions that are very difficult because we don’t have the basic things that we work with. There are certain things that we need to work on a timely basis, because if you don’t do it timely, you’ll lose a life. Some of the things we need, for example, drips that we need to release fluid for patients. We don’t have them,” she told The Voice newspaper in an interview at the BrikamaDistrict Hospital.
She added that sometimes they don’t have the fluid itself, which is needed at the hospital, and these challenges definitely affecting their work.
She stated that Brikama solely relied on the central government to receive this much-needed supply.
“Brikama is not a board hospital that can buy some basic things. But the hospital is heavily relying on the government. Once these supplies are lacking with the government, it becomes a big challenge for us to be able to get them from our covers,” she highlighted.
She pointed out that the most common problems are low blood and high blood pressure, which are sometimes cause by not attending nursing services regularly.
“In some cases, before we realize that a woman’s blood pressure is high or low, already she will be in labour, and that poses a big challenge to us,” she said.
She, therefore, urged men to accompany their wives to ease the burden on their wives during labour, either by blood donation or providing medications needed during labour, because women normally lose a lot of blood during child delivery.
