Despite all efforts to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) 4 and 5 set up by the United Nations for countries to reduce child mortality and improve maternal health by the end of 2015, Ghana still failed to meet the target though there was significant improvement in that direction within the period, according to the Ghana Health Service (GHS).

The target which was to reduce under-5 mortalities to 40 per 1,000 live births and reduce maternal mortality to 185 per 100,000 live births did not materialise before the close of 2015, but has to embrace the introduction of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

This was revealed by the Director in-charge of Family Health Division of GHS, Dr Partrick Kuma Aboagye, at Sunyani Thursday during a review of the 2015 annual performance.

He said since 1993 when the MDGs were set up, the country’s neonatal mortality rate has reduced from 46 to 32 per 1,000 live births by the end of 2011 and further decreased from 32 to 29 per 1,000 live births by the end of 2014.

At under-5 mortality, the country also saw reduction from 80 per 1,000 live births to 60 per 1,000 by the end of 2014. On maternal mortality rate, he said though the reduction has been sluggish, it stands at 316 per 100,000 live births, making a modest decline from 760 per 100,000 live births since inception of the targets.

Dr Aboagye bemoaned poor quality of maternal death audit at health institutions.

He said, for instance, the year 2015 saw reduction in maternal death audit which stood at 3.1% compared to 80.7% death audit in 2014.

Due to that, he said maternal and perinatal death audit trainings were currently ongoing in some regions to help revamp death audit to improve upon the quality of maternal and perinatal health and death audits for service providers to use as guidance to improve upon the quality of maternal and newborn care so as to prevent avoidable maternal and newborn deaths.

In a related development, he said the Volta and Brong Ahafo regions have topped in adolescent pregnancies, with the former scoring 22.1%, followed by B/A with 21.3%.

He asked health personnel to canvass for support from the general public, especially parents and traditional leaders to help reverse the tide of teenage pregnancies in the regions.

Director General of Ghana Health Service, Dr Ebenezer Appiah-Denkyira, also bemoaned skewed distribution of doctors in the country where Accra and Kumasi only have about 50% of the country’s doctors to the detriment of the three regions in the north.

He asked newly-trained doctors to accept posting to the northern regions to balance the equation to health delivery to all corners of the country.

Dr Appiah-Denkyira said the GHS was facing a lot of challenges, including the non-replacement of pensioned staff or what he termed as staff attrition. In addition to that, “there is also lack of high level administrative staff at the rural areas to man rural health facilities,” he added.

The GHS director general said there was also a skewed distribution of specialised personnel at teaching hospitals and erratic flow of funds for running medical facilities.

That, he mentioned, was putting a lot of pressure on limited internally generated fund. He charged the NHIA to reimburse hospitals on time to help cope with the challenge of inadequate funds to run the hospitals.