By Florence Afriyie Mensah
Kumasi, Feb.24, GNA – A holistic approach that includes thorough demographic analysis, strategic facility placement, and infrastructure enhancements is essential to improve regional disparity, availability and accessibility of emergency obstetrics and neonatal care and services.
Professor Atinuke Olusola Adebanji at the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), explained that allocation of obstetrics and neonatal care must be based on population demographics, proximity to the community, and a better transportation network to the facility.
Furthermore, facilities must be built close to communities, especially in remote areas where access to healthcare was limited.
The Professor of Statistics, delivering her professorial inaugural lecture on the topic: “Facts from Artefacts: A Journey in Statistical Inquisition,” noted that the strategy shortened travel times, thereby ensuring timely access to crucial obstetrics and neonatal care in remote areas.
Again, transportation and infrastructure networks need to be improved to ease accessibility to these facilities.
These include enhancing roads, transportation modes, and communication networks to connect outlying communities to healthcare hubs.
“Likewise, complete coverage can be ensured by placing facilities in a strategic location that can offer both basic and emergency obstetric and neonatal care,” she said.
“This approach assures comprehensive coverage while meeting the different healthcare needs of communities.”
Prof Adebanji, touching on reformed community-based healthcare initiatives, said it aided in eliminating imbalances in access to health resources while addressing socioeconomic and spatial inequities.
The Community-Based Health Planning and Services (CHPS) plan, which was adopted in 1999 as Ghana’s primary health care strategy, faced numerous implementation issues.
They included transportation problems, inadequate equipment, motivation of workers, logistics and skilled personnel, monitoring and evaluation, and human resource constraints, due to brain drain.
To address those challenges, she said the CHPS Initiative (CHPS+) was introduced in 2017.
“Post-CHPS+ studies have demonstrated that some of the issues persist, owing to a lack of community ownership, insufficient logistics, and the capacity of community health workers to handle emergency deliveries and newborn resuscitation.”
Prof. Adebanji noted that a key component of the reform should be addressing community entry lapses and investment in capacity-building programmes for healthcare professionals.
It should also focus on skills enhancement in areas such as antenatal and postnatal care, neonatal healthcare, accurate data collection, and data-driven decision-making.
GNA