Baragwanath to get 12 midwives to combat hospital’s ‘huge problems’

TWELVE more midwives will be assigned to Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto, as problems continue to plague the country’s biggest hospital.

The Gauteng Department of Health said this week that Bara hospital was experiencing “huge problems”.

“Midwives are in short supply throughout the country not only at Chris Hani Baragwanath,” said Simon Zwane, spokesperson for the Department of Health.

“The department has assigned 38 community service nurses to the hospital’s maternity complex. Bara hospital has 28 midwives and 12 more will be joining by the end of February,” said Zwane.

He said the hospital was facing several problems, with one of the biggest challenges being the high number of people seeking treatment at Bara.

“It is the only hospital serving the south of Johannesburg. It is also a referral hospital for the North West and Mpumalanga,” he said.

“Many of the pregnant women present at the hospital are at advanced stages of pregnancy and sometimes without having attended ante-natal clinics,” he said

It meant that it was sometimes too late to make the necessary intervention to assist mothers with underlying infections before they gave birth.

Zwane added that the hospital had two theatres dedicated to the delivery of babies and between 65 and 90 babies were delivered at the hospital daily.

The department was responding to a report last week which cited a letter leaked to the newspaper, from the hospital’s head of obstetrics to his counterpart at the University of the Witwatersrand.

In the letter, Dr Eckhart Buchmann describes how staff shortages and overcrowding led to two avoidable infant deaths in the first two weeks of January alone.

Doctors reported brain damage in babies who were born asphyxiated and had not received treatment in time. Unhygienic conditions in the maternity wards, including maggots in the blood-soaked bedding, were also reported.

In November last year the problem was exacerbated by the non-payment of the Khalipha Agency, which supplied nurses to the hospital. The agency was paid in December. – Additional reporting Sapa.