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| A pregnant woman |
By John Awe
The Guardian, Thursday 25, July 2013
Bungee jumping is a crazy sport where people jump off
cliffs and other lethal heights with ropes tied to their ankles. You would
think that is insanely dangerous, right? Newsflash: bungee jumping is several
times safer than delivering a baby in Nigeria! It’s not hearsay; it’s
statistically established. There is one death for every 500,000 bungee jumps,
whereas there is roughly 500 to 800 deaths for every 100,000 live births in
Nigeria.
A few more grim facts to pour a bucket of cold water on Nigerian
husbands tonight: 11, 600 women lost their lives during childbirth in the first
three months of this year according to the Society of Gynaecology and
Obstetrics of Nigeria. Last year the World Health Organization (WHO), United Nations
Children's Fund (UNICEF) and United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) reported
that maternal mortality had been halved in the last 20 years in most regions of
the world, but regretted that sub-Saharan Africa, led by Nigeria continued to
lag behind.
In May, the United Kingdom's International Development
Minister, Ms. Lynne Featherstone, on a visit to Nigeria announced that Nigeria currently
accounts for 10 per cent of the world's maternal mortality. This news would absolutely
scandalise us as a nation if we weren’t otherwise so busy seeing to the
fertilisation of the surviving child-bearing female adults.
And these dreadful statistics are only from reported
cases. How many more women die quietly of pregnancy-related complications in
their homes, unregistered maternity centres, some dingy rooms of iya abiyes (local midwives) or even in
some of the so called private clinics with poor equipment and poorer personnel
all over the country? Many would
argue, quite justifiably, that nearly as many as the reported maternal deaths
go unreported across Nigeria. To provide some insight, WHO’s records for
2003 suggest that two-thirds of the births in Nigeria in that year occurred at
home.
In the face of the horrible statistics, it takes the
stoic fatalism of Nigerians to keep the maternities and neonatal clinics
bustling with activities every day, all year round. To many, the statistics are
distant and even unreal; just cold figures. But like the American journalist and
author, Paul Brodeur, once famously remarked, statistics are human beings with
the tears wiped off. These numbers actually represent needlessly wasted mothers,
daughters, daughters-in-law, aunts and sisters of living people. They represent
dashed hopes, destroyed destinies and deeply-seated sorrow and pain in many
hearts scattered across the country.
To those whose relatives, neighbours, friends and
colleagues have recently swelled these statistics, the import of Brodeur’s
remark will ring home more stridently; as those who very nearly become part of
the statistics themselves. Belonging to the latter category is one Mrs Cordelia
Ifechukwude, whose story was reported in the media a couple of weeks ago.
Ifechukwude had a protracted labour in a private hospital in Alakuko, a suburb
of Lagos. The baby ultimately went into distress and none of the nurses on duty
noticed. It ultimately died and the mother’s womb was infected. The lady was in
the throes of death when her husband decided to rush her to Ayinke House,
General Hospital, Ikeja, where her life was saved.
Ifechukwude’s case illustrates how very easily an
otherwise healthy pregnant woman can lose the battle for life in many of the
hospitals in Nigeria today. There is nobody ensuring that anyone who opens a
hospital is qualified or equipped to do so. Long term hospital cleaners and
auxiliary nurses have been known to open medical practices in Nigeria with no
one to challenge them until they commit blue murder, literally. It is only then
that there is a circus of government officials, medical authorities and
policemen, threatening fire and brimstones on quacks.
Even where a doctor has the competence to open a private
practice, shouldn’t there be a body to go round regularly to ensure that they have
basic equipment and competent support medical personnel at all times? In
Ifechukwude’s case, for instance, the hospital owner was said to be a qualified
doctor, who had a regular employment elsewhere in Lagos, with the result that he
was hardly available to monitor his patients. In his absence, the nurses held
court, and some of them, according to Ifechukwude, were so crude that they believed
assisted delivery entailed aggressively pressing the protruding belly of the
mother to force the baby out.
Sad still is the fact that when there are cases of
blatant medical malpractices against some of these hospitals there are no
visible repercussions that others can learn from. Ifechukwude, for instance,
alleged that she filed a petition with the medical council to no avail. The
hospital was only in the news again after a fresh scandal was blown open by
another patient. All these factors make private hospitals in Nigeria a
dangerous gamble for women seeking to deliver babies.
The public hospitals are by far safer in Nigeria. For one
thing, the chances of being delivered of a baby by an iron bender are quite
remote. For another thing, even when you are unlucky to have an inexperienced
house officer handling your case, there is always a roaming professor or senior
consultant, with a dozen medical students in tow, who comes in at the nick of
time to save the day.
Of course the public hospitals have their own problems.
They are obviously underfunded, overstretched and over-burdened; probably the
same reasons for which they tend to breed a rich specimen of impatient,
grouchy, and nasty medical personnel. The nurses particularly treat the
patients and their relatives as though they were some of the ailments the
hospitals were set up to cure. And by some queer arrangements the nastiest of
the nurses get sent to the neonatal wards. It would shock many to know that in
this day and age pregnant women admitted for delivery still have to sit on
straight-backed chairs overnight in the absence of bed-space in Lagos General
Hospitals. They call it ‘sit-out’; their colleagues in other climes would no
doubt call it shameful. But many women are opting to endure this and be alive
to hold their babies than take a gamble with their lives in the practically
unregulated private medical practice space in Nigeria.
How hard can it be for a government to supervise the
quality of care being rendered to its citizens? How difficult is it for
government to ensure that the public hospitals have the basic amenities to
dispense care to the citizens? How difficult is it to set up a few world-class
public hospitals that women in sub Saharan Africa can flock to for safe
delivery of their babies? Why is it that no state governor has made a priority
of having such a hospital till date? The Lagos State Government deserves some
commendation for building new General Hospitals, but if pregnant women are
still being turned back or having to sit-out for lack of bed space, it is
clearly not doing enough.
Anyone who could have done something to prevent Nigeria
from getting to this sorry pass has blood on his hands. So do all those who can
do something now, but choose not to. It is a crying shame that a matador being
ushered into an arena with an incensed 600kg bull stands a far better chance of
emerging alive than a pregnant woman being wheeled into the labour room of a
hospital in Nigeria.
- http://www.ngrguardiannews.com/index.php/columnist/128016-awe-dangerous-country-to-be-a-mother
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