She had been in labour all day, and her baby’s head was halfway out when the poorly equipped clinic decided it could not help her. It sent her to Uganda’s biggest hospital Mulago Hospital, where nurses rushed to put her on a gurney and wheel her to the operating theatre.
But at the door of the operating theatre, she was turned away. “We’re already closed,” the staff said. “Our schedule is done.”
At least the mother survived. In several infamous cases recently, Ugandan women have died when they were denied treatment at hospitals – sometimes because they were unable to pay bribes to the staff, or because the staff claimed to be overworked. One woman, an elected politician named Jennifer Anguko, bled to death in a major public hospital when nobody examined her for 12 hours.The woman, Hadja Nansubuga, spent the night in agony. The operation was finally performed the next morning, 14 hours later. By then, her baby was dead, and her uterus had to be removed.
Perhaps the biggest scandal of African health care is the inequity of it. The risk of dying in childbirth is more than 300 times greater for African women than for Canadian women. For every 10,000 women in Canada, only one will die in pregnancy or childbirth. Among the same number of African women, 355 will die from entirely preventable causes.
In Uganda, for example, only 42 per cent of women deliver their babies under professional supervision in a clinic or hospital. Nearly 6,000 women in Uganda die in childbirth every year, and 70 per cent of those deaths could be prevented by proper health care. Meanwhile, wealthy and politically connected Ugandans routinely fly out of the country for treatment in expensive private hospitals abroad.
While the rich can fly to another country for abortions, ordinary Ugandan women have little access to basic contraceptives. Only 24 per cent of married women use family planning, and 58 per cent have never used a modern contraceptive. As a result, Uganda has one of the highest rates of population growth in the world, with an average of 6.7 children per woman.
Technically, health care is free in Uganda, yet many pregnant women who seek admission to hospital are ordered to buy the medical supplies that the hospital will need to treat them – everything from surgical gloves and delivery mats to razor blades and cotton wool. In other cases, doctors or nurses demand bribes from the patients. Faced with those costs, many women give up and go home. “When they’re told to buy those supplies, they just don’t come back,” says Denis Kibira, an activist at the Coalition for Health Promotion and Social Development in Uganda.
More than a year after the Muskoka summit at which the G8 leaders announced a $5-billion plan for maternal and child health, most African countries are suffering the same crisis of death and injury that they’ve always seen.
Maternal health seemed to be an obsession for global leaders last year. It was the focus of major summits by the G8, the African Union and the United Nations, and it was announced as one of the priorities for the U.S. administration’s $63-billion global health initiative. “It is no exaggeration to call 2010 the year of maternal and child health,” the University of Washington said in a report on health financing.
The reasons for this concern are obvious: Hundreds of thousands of women are dying in childbirth worldwide every year, and the number has declined by barely 2 per cent annually since 1990. About 80 per cent of the world’s maternal deaths are occurring in just 21 countries, of which 15 are in sub-Saharan Africa.
The Majority of Births in Uganda are at Home - Read these facts!
Blog from a group of Canadian Nurses who worked in Mulago Hospital in the low risk ob ward
http://birthinuganda2009.blogspot.com/
Article from Guest 'Seane Corn' on Oprah Show:
Giving birth in Uganda is a dangerous and dirty business. The clinics where the impoverished can afford to give birth are so awful, unclean and ill equipped that many women would rather take the chance and birth at home, even though they may not have the proper or sanitary instruments necessary to guarantee a healthy and safe delivery.
As a result, both infant and mother mortality are heartbreakingly high because of infection and lack of proper care. Lost is the art of birthing in a sacred and compassionate way and often the mothers are left alone, in their pain and without support, only to be treated indifferently and harshly during the birth itself. Many women are even hit by their midwives if they cry out or scream. Also, because of high instances of untreated malaria, mothers often miscarry in the second trimester.
Caesareans are practiced with unnecessary frequency, abortions are primitive, and often mother's with HIV/AIDS aren't given the drugs available to prevent mother to child transmission at the time of delivery. All too commonly, the disease is passed to the child through her breast milk as a result. Natalie's description of the standard birthing practice sounded barbaric and frightening, and I couldn't imagine what giving birth for the Ugandan poor must be like
Read more: http://www.oprah.com/spirit/Seane-Corn-Blogs-from-Kasana-Uganda/4#ixzz1fPE6v5bD
