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Thandeka Moyo, Health Reporter
MPILO Central Hospital is working on establishing a specialised clinic for pregnant women to reduce about 300 stillbirths recorded by the institution annually.
Mpilo clinical director Dr Solwayo Ngwenya said the establishment of the clinic comes after a visit by two specialists from the United Kingdom’s University of Manchester, Professor Alexander Heazell an obstetrician and Dr Rebecca Smyth who is a senior midwifery lecturer at the same university.
The two are training Mpilo staff on improving maternal health services for two weeks.
“We are looking forward to establishing a specialised clinic for our women in a bid to reduce still births whose rate is still high. At Mpilo, 30 out of 1 000 pregnancies result in still births and per year we deliver about 10 000 babies in our maternity ward,” said Dr Ngwenya.
“We are grateful to be hosting the two specialists from Manchester who are here to train and share knowledge so that we improve our health care services related to child and maternal health as a public institution.”
Dr Ngwenya said the specialised clinic will be established at Mpilo.
“Our main worry is that studies both locally and internationally have proven that women with a history of stillbirth have a 20 times risk of having another one in their lifetime. This clinic will also cater for such women with a history of still births and we will achieve all this using locally available resources,” added Dr Ngwenya.
He said stillbirths can be caused by hypertension, diabetes in pregnancy, infections like syphilis, congenital abnormalities in the baby and sometimes causes can be unknown.
“Good leadership and accountability can help reduce poor perinatal outcomes at Mpilo and Zimbabwe. Simple measures like staff redeployments, use of extra operating theatres can improve outcomes. These measures do not cost money and would be appropriate in low-resourced settings,” said Dr Ngwenya.
Globally there are 2,6 million stillbirths recorded annually according to the World Health Organisation. — @thamamoe
Online Reporter