|
Temeke Municipal Hospital has serious shortage of facilities
2007-10-05 09:19:25
By Njonanje Samwel
Temeke municipal hospital lacks essential medical facilities hindering it to provide better health services to people seeking treatment of various diseases, it has been revealed.
Temeke hospital Director, Dr. Suleiman Muttani said this on Wednesday in a short briefing to Princess Astrid of Belgium when she paid a visit to the hospital.
Dr. Muttani said the hospital was overwhelmed by the number of people without patient records showing that the hospital registered between 1,200 and 1,500 new patients out of whom 120 were admitted daily.
`The hospital serves as the only choice of medical services for Temeke Municipal residents .The area lacks enough and well-equipped private hospitals,` said Dr Muttani.
He added that malaria was the leading killer disease for most patients attending the hospital followed by pneumonia and diarrhea, adding: `We need more efforts to scale down the pandemic.`
`Under the Roll Back Malaria Programme 2007/08, Temeke Municipal Council has set aside about 39 million in its budget to scale down the diseases, an amount which is scarce compared to the real needs,` he said.
During her visit, Princess Astrid was received with heavily congested wards with some patients taking refuge on the floors.
The situation was more serious in the Maternal wards where some two expectant mothers had to share a single bed with others sleeping on the floor putting them at risk of contaminating other diseases.
Two maternal patients, Zuwena Isaka and Adela Atiliyo, were seen lying on the floor while in serious condition prompting one delegate to shed tears.
Asked to comment on the congestion, Nurse In Charge of the Maternal Ward Christina Mnyorwa, attributed the problem to lack of buildings to accommodate the overgrowing number of patients.
She said that the ward had the capacity of accommodating 21 patients at a time, but received nearly 100patients at which 60 to 70 underwent delivery every twenty four hours.
She named the other reason contributing to the congestion as lack of enough midwives, adding that there were only three nurses to attend all the patients in a shift.
Mnyorwa said: `It takes 45 minutes to attend to one non complicated maternal patient and at times it takes as long as three hours to go to a complicated one.`
Asked over the quality of service delivered, patients said shortage of medical practitioners was the only stumbling block but were quick to add that the available ones performed to their best.
Following lack of facilities, the visiting Princess Astrid vowed to assist the hospital in terms of medical facilities.
`I need more time to look on areas which mostly need intervention,` Princess Astrid said.
Princess Astrid was expected to leave Dar for Belgium yesterday.
|
