Accra, March 16, GNA-Dr Emmanuel Srofenyo, the Medical Director, Greater Accra Regional Hospital, has called for the establishment of Obstetric Triage Implementation Package (OTIP) units in all newly built health facilities to help reduce maternal and new-born mortality in the country.
OTIP is a process designed to identify and promptly attend to at-risk, expectant mothers as soon as they arrive at a hospital to give birth. It is an easy-to –apply format, which helps midwives make quick and accurate decisions in high-stress situations.
Based on the assessments, midwives prepare an immediate care plan based on a patient’s risk level, which is easily identified by a color-coded wrist band given to the patients.
Dr Srofenyo said it was very important for government to commit more resources, reduce rotation staff, provide adequate infrastructure with dedicated units where OTIP processes could be carried to reduce the deahs.
“OTIP should be integrated when new hospitals are being planned so that even before the project is delivered to the staff, they would be left with no option than to use them to save lives,” he said.
The Medical Director made the call at a dissemination meeting to share experiences and lessons learnt from the OTIP programme organised by Kybele-Ghana, a non-governmental organisation in collaboration with the Ghana Health Service in Accra.
It was on the theme “From Theory to Practice”.
According to the World Bank Group, Ghana has 308 maternal deaths in pregnancy and childbirth for every 100,000 live births, a rate which is 16 times higher than the United States. A situation, which is due to the longer waiting period before pregnant women get to see healthcare providers.
Dr Srofenyo explained that in the past there were instances where pregnant women no matter their conditions were attended to on first come first serve basis, saying that saw some women with critical conditions collapsing and in extreme cases, dying due to long queues at health facilities.
“So, the introduction of OTIP, which prioritises patients according to the severity of the condition that they present with and promote early assessment, has come at the right time to help save more lives,” he stated.
He noted that OTIP, since its implementation in Ghana in 2019 had seen a big transformation as far as maternal and new born deaths were concerned and as such government needed to commit resources to effectively sustain it now that the funding from development partners had ended.
Dr Medge Owen, the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Kybele International, said OTIP, since its introduction had resulted in the training of over 500 frontline health personnel and served more than 500,000 women in Ghana.
She said Kybele together with the Ghana Health Service started piloting OTIP at the Greater Accra Regional Hospital in 2013 since then the programme had been scaled up to nine other hospitals.
At the hospitals, only five per cent of patients were seen within 10 munites of hospital arrival but after OTIP, 85 per cent of patients were evaluated within the recommended timeframe.
In addition, documentation of a diagnosis and treatment plan also increased to over 99 per cent, Dr Owen stated.
Dr Owen, also a Professor, Anaesthesiology, Wake Forest University School of Medicine, further explained that the OTIP manual used in the process included resources such as checklists for triage materials, assessment, and monitoring forms as well as risk identification charts.
She called for broader national scale up and adoption of the process in Ghana to address the challenge.
Newborn mothers at the event shared their experiences and how OTIP had benefited them and asked that the project be implemented in all hospitals across the country to address delays pregnant women encountered in accessing healthcare.
Frontline health workers also shared experiences on how OTIP was first introduced and implemented with a call for well dedicated staff to champion the course to ensure sustainability.
GNA