Pumwani Maternity Referral Hospital, the biggest facility handling maternal, neonatal care, is now at a whole new level embodying improved service delivery to hundreds of thousands of expectant mothers.
This emerged Wednesday during a familiarisation tour of the facility which since His Excellency Governor Johnson Sakaja took office,the facility has witnessed improved growth.
The hospital’s Chief Executive Officer, had this to say:
“Last year we had around 19,000 deliveries we do 5,500 deliveries in a quarter and approximately 1,600 per month and we are able to serve mothers through NHIF and Linda mama initiative and so far the services we offer are the maternal care then we also offer services in the neonatal care where we have the NBU unit which serves as a referral to babies below 28 days. We also have the MCH for mothers who come for the antenatal visit, pediatric, physiotherapy, nutrition clinics.
We have a 354 bed capacity. 87 cots for the NBU and 20 bed capacity for the kangaroo mother care (KMC) unit.
For Pumwani we have a shortage of staffing because we have one midwife serving 18 mothers against the WHO recommended ratio of two midwives to one patient. This is an acute shortage that we need to work on.
She however acknowledged efforts that are being rolled out by HE the Governor and CECm Madam Silantoi to employ more nurses
The hospital is also in the process of hiring nurses on locum to ease the gap
On his part the Chief Officer in charge of health facilities Mr Geoffrey Mosiria had this to say: “This facility recently it didn’t have a lift but now it’s already in place. We also have installed a standby generator and also equipping the newborn unit to serve those babies as well as the theatre, we are working towards equipping and operationalization of the three theatres also with the introduction of the CEO we have seen a lot of improvement.
We are taking services closer to the People according to the vision of his excellency Governor Sakaja. We want to empower our level two three facilities so as we decongest Pumwani hospital to be left to handle only those complicated cases.
On the issue of staffing this is what the chief officer alluded,
“As a county government we are in the process of engaging additional nurses and also shortlisting for healthcare workers is currently ongoing for doctors nurses and other specialities.
Also in order to decongest our maternity, because mothers come in with UTIs, and others with incomplete abortions, they end up in our Labor word in order to handle this we have an outpatient facility which was closed down during covid period we have plans to revive it so that it can help filter mothers those who come with those UTI cases can be handled there and discharged home so that we only have active mothers who are in labor at our maternity ward.