Kwape Decries High Maternal, Infant Mortality
Innocent Selatlhwa | Monday August 24, 2020 12:53
Kwape announced in a press conference over the weekend that they have so far recorded 43 maternal deaths since the beginning of the year.
We are concerned by high numbers of mothers and infants losing their lives during birth. Since the beginning of the year we recorded 43 deaths of new mothers and we want these numbers to drop.
Some of these deaths are due to mothers visiting health facilities late after falling pregnant, not honouring advise from health practitioners, excessive bleeding and botched abortions in some cases,” he said.
Kwape said for infants, it is mostly because the mothers did not honour appointments for check ups, lack of exercise and poor diet by mothers.
Kwape reiterated his ministry’s position to explore how traditional medicine can be integrated with modern medicine. Kwape said some of the medicines and practices had already proven to be of value and there is need to find a way to integrate them and possibly end up exporting them to the world.
“Before we had mercenaries introduce hospitals we had a way of dealing with illnesses and other health conditions like thobega, use of traditional herbs and many other practices through which we kept healthy and cured ailments. It is time we look back at those, research and see how we can integrate them into western medicine and possibly sell our expertise to other countries,” he said.
The Kanye South legislator said as part of their five-year strategy, which began in 2018, they have made prevention a priority over cure as the latter is more expensive. “Prevention is important hence one of the things we are doing to avoid diseases is ensuring that all children get all the vaccinations they are supposed to get.
This goes a long way in ensuring good health as they grow. We have also decided to decentralise services by empowering District Health Management Teams to improve services.
This needs to be boosted by the use of technology to have a database for all patients so we can be able to observe trends and deal with diseases better,” he said.