MEC wants to curb incidents of pregnant woman giving birth outside clinics

The Limpopo MEC for health, Dr Phophi Ramathuba, noted with concern some reports of women delivering babies outside healthcare facilities as a result of some of them not operating 24 hours a day, leading to risking both the life of the mother and that of the newborn baby.

 “The department was in the process of activating our clinics to operate 24 hours. Unfortunately, Covid-19 affected this project negatively, leading us to regress, and the main reasons for our failure to operate 24 hours include staff shortages, such as clinical nurse practitioners, midwives who can function independently and many more personnel.

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“When a woman misses her periods, she must go to the clinic and do a pregnancy test. If she chooses to keep the baby, she must start antenatal clinic visits before 20 weeks and not wait until the pregnancy is visible. “Antenatal visits do not only focus on the health of the mother and the baby. During the visits, midwives usually advise on the place of delivery and mode of transportation and any other logistics.” The MEC advised, “Whenever a woman start to experience labour pains, she must not wait until the pains are worse. There is no woman who will deliver outside our facilities because there is no place in our province which you need 10 hours to reach.”

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The department appealed to every pregnant woman to attend antenatal visits, where they will be told the expected date of delivery. They must remain vigilant for that date, and once labour pains start, they must not wait. “We are currently facing serious budget cuts, which will continuously affect our programmes on improving service delivery, thus we want to work together with our communities to try to avert some of these negative incidents,” said Ramathuba.