PRIOR to the present administration in Ondo State led by Dr Olusegun Mimiko, the state was declared by the World Bank to have the worst maternal and child health indices in the entire South-West geo-political zone of the country. This unpleasant situation, according to the state Commissioner for Health, Dr Dayo Adeyanju, served as a wake-up call for a new team to undertake as a matter of urgency the total reform of a dysfunctional health system.'The governor on assumption of office met ill-motivated workforce, poor infrastructure, poorly managed health sector and with very poor health indices. And as a medical doctor himself and a two-time commissioner for health in Ondo State, it is expected that he would want to revamp the health sector', he said.Adeyanju, who conducted health correspondents on a facility tour of the Mother and Child Hospital which is under construction at the Medical Village in Ondo town recently, said the state embarked on the construction of the facility as a component of the Abiye (safe motherhood) programme of the state government in order to take care of people in the senatorial zone.Adeyanju added: 'So when we want to reform our health sector, we started from the primary healthcare, this is aside from the fact that the governor himself is a grassroots man. We understand that we must go to the rural areas which was why we launched the Abiye programme in order to revert the totally unacceptable increasing maternal mortality.'According to him, the programme was structured to pragmatically address the impediments militating against ensuring that pregnancy was no longer a death sentence in the state.'So Abiye was meant to reverse that trend and to ensure that our women no longer die. We discovered that the reason why our women were dying was because the delivery was not being taken by skilled birth attendants. We actually ensured that we got skilled birth attendants to take deliveries and we looked at how we could track the women back to our health facilities by making sure that we catch all of them through registration', the Commissioner explained.According to him, it had been discovered that most of the pregnant women patronised traditional birth attendants (TBA) and mission homes while some even took deliveries of themselves which were the reasons for the high maternal mortality rate.'So if we are able to get them to come and deliver at the health facilities, we will be saving a lot of lives. So Abiye is basically to bring back those women to the health facilities. So if we are able to get them to come and deliver at the health facilities, we will be saving a lot of lives. So having registered them we refer them to people we call health rangers who will track them and we have equipped these health rangers with tricycles to penetrate all the nooks and crannies of the state,' he explained.' They also have a customised checklist to help us determine the women that are at risk; if a woman is short-statured and has a big baby with small pelvis, there is no way that woman will deliver normally. If there is no checklist, there is no way you would know. The TBA has nothing of such; they will ask her to continue to push until she ruptures her uterus. So for us when we register them, we will be able to know those that are at risk; the woman who has high blood pressure in pregnancy, the woman who has diabetes in pregnancy or those with other medical problems and in view of this, we can do what we call the back plan for them.'Speaking on the achievements of Abiye since inception, Adeyanju explained : 'In one year(2009-2010) of the Abiye programme, we succeeded in reducing maternal mortality by 15 per cent. So we believe that by 2015, we would have achieved a 75 per cent reduction thereby achieving MDGs and be the saving grace for the country because Nigeria has been listed as one of the 40countries that will not achieve MDGs. They said if Nigeria will achieve MDGs it will be in 2095.'He added: 'When we presented this result in Washington, the World Bank said for the first time in the history of Nigeria we are getting result. They said before now, when they gave support, people didn't come back with result'The Chief Medical Director of the Mother and Child Hospital, Akure, Dr. Lawal Oyeneyin, also gave the scorecard of the hospital since inception: 'As of June 30, 2012 at the Mother and Child Hospital, Akure, we have registered and treated 25, 192 children under the age of five. We have registered and treated 21,206 pregnant women making a total of 46,398. We have successfully delivered 11, 832 women including 1, 844 by caesarean section. We have since admitted and successfully treated 6,215 children under the age of five'According to him, the Ondo State Abiye programme has been recognized as a benchmark for Africa and indeed the developing world. 'We had a mandate to run an integrated maternal and child care facility fully poised to offer qualitative and critical intervention when required towards reducing maternal and child death in Ondo State,' he added.
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