The Korle-bu Teaching Hospital can now boast of adequate rooms to assign one delivery ward to expecting mothers, making it possible for willing husbands to be by the side of their wives during labour.

Professor Enyonam Kwawukume, Director of the Gynaecology Department, who made this known to the Ghana News Agency on Sunday, said: "This is made possible by the refurbishing of the second floor of the Maternity Block of the hospital by MTN Ghana Foundation," a global telecommunication facility.

MTN Ghana Foundation on Friday, August 14, handed over the keys to the transformed second floor of the hospital to the Korle-bu Administration, with 11 delivery rooms, a theatre, a recovery ward with three beds, doctors' rest room, an Orderly changing room, a store and an autoclave and wash up area.

MTN also provided 11 delivery beds, a theatre table with full accessories, full combination theatre light, radiant heater, full set of anaesthetic machine, cabinets, drip stands and several other obstetrics and gynaecology equipment.

Prof. Kwawukume said formerly, the floor had only seven delivery wards, each with two beds to allow more than one expecting mother access to a room.

"With the 11 deli very wards we can now have one mother to one room and their husbands can now be by their sides during labour and have the opportunity to cut the umbilical cord when the baby is born, if they so wish," he stressed.

He noted, however, that the most important impact of the refurbished floor would be the drastic reduction in waiting time, particularly for emergency cases, saying that in the past, expecting mothers scheduled for theatre waited for up to about eight hours and in the process some lives were lost.

"We used to have only one theatre on the first floor, but with the additional theatre on the second floor we can now reduce the waiting time to about two hours or less and save lives," he said. Prof. Kwawukume said what was left now was for more staff to be engaged to man the facilities in order to maximize the benefits, adding that the department had made a request to the hospital administration to augment its personnel level.

MTN Ghana Foundation adopted the second floor of the Korle-bu Maternity block as its health flagship project at the request of the Women Caucus in Parliament, and invested some $600,000 in the refurbishing project.

The other flagship project of the company is the provision of 10 MTN learning centres in all the regions of Ghana at an estimated cost of GH¢929,580.