The maternity unit of the Ashaiman Polyclinic needs urgent expansion to enable medical staff to provide quality health care to the densely populated Municipality.

Dr Mavis Oppong-Addoh, Medical Officer in charge of the Ashaiman Polyclinic, who made this known in an interview with the Ghana News Agency, therefore, appealed to government, organizations and individuals to come to the aid of the Polyclinic.

Dr Oppong-Addoh said with a large number of deliveries (over 3000 births annually) and Ante-Natal Clinic (ANC) attendants, it was obvious that the maternity unit is currently overwhelmed.

She said the labour ward needed a facelift to enable it to accommodate more women who were in the first and lying in a stage of labour.

She indicated that facilities including beds were not adequate for the number of pregnant women the polyclinic attended it stating that they attended to an average of 15 deliveries in a day.

She disclosed that in April 2019 which was one of the peak months, about 400 babies were delivered at the Ashaiman Polyclinic.

The Medical Officer regretted that mothers had no option but to share beds especially at night noting that “we sometimes give those who aren’t far gone, the option of going to Tema General Hospital but most of them opt to stay and would rather share the bed”.

To temporarily solve the problem, she said they sometimes created functional bed space by moving some of the clients to the general gynae and female recovery wards until there was space for them in the labour ward.

Such temporal measures meant the midwives and obstetricians had to shuffle between these wards till they were moved back to the labour ward, she added.

Touching on other parts of the hospital that needed upgrading, she stated that the main Out-Patients Department leaked especially in the rainy season.

“Although management over the previous years had tried to rectify it with its IGF, the old nature and design of the building leave room for more leakages as the old ones are being plugged,” she said.

She observed that the erection of pillars and concrete roofing at the OPD would not only solve the problem, but also create additional space for more consulting rooms and offices to improve upon client care.

The polyclinic, she said, was poised to deliver quality health care services to the people of Ashiaman and its environs saying with the help of benefactors and stakeholders, the Polyclinic could be upgraded to ensure improved quality care in a better patient-friendly environment.

Ashaiman Polyclinic was established as a health post in 1957, upgraded to a health center in 1990 and then to a polyclinic in 2009.

Meanwhile, 8 babies were born at the Polyclinic on Christmas day and 4 on Boxing Day.