Kenya: Its time to stop preventable death among mothers and children

Kenya: It's Time to Stop These Preventable Deaths of Mothers and Children

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Photo: Lauren Everitt/AllAfrica

Many mothers at Kenyatta National Hospital prefer Kangaroo Care over incubators so that they can touch their babies.

The day of a child's birth should be a day filled with joy, but for many Kenyans, it is a day of fear. For the most unfortunate, it is a day of tragedy.

For Atieno, a woman living in western Kenya, the fear lasted for days. She laboured for more than 72 hours at home in her rural village. There was heavy bleeding and when Atieno finally delivered her daughter, it was without the help of a skilled birth attendant or life-saving products such as oxytocin to stop bleeding.

Both mother and baby were fortunate. They survived one of the riskiest experiences a woman and her child will face: childbirth.

While Atieno and her baby survived, too many others do not. As doctors, we hear and see these stories every day. One in 38 Kenyan women is at risk of dying from childbirth complications such as excessive bleeding or obstructed labour.

Every woman and child deserves high-quality health care, but there are glaring gaps in the care people receive across our country.

We can change this. Kenya's doctors are calling on our leaders to create a comprehensive national legislative framework to improve the health of women and children and end preventable deaths.

Kenya has the second-highest rate of stillbirths in East Africa. And our newborns face grave challenges such as being born prematurely, losing oxygen during birth, and contracting deadly infections such as sepsis after birth. For those who survive their first days of life, threats such as pneumonia, diarrhoea, and malaria continue throughout childhood.

Children born in western or northern Kenya are less likely to celebrate their fifth birthdays than those born in central Kenya, according to the 2014 Demographic Health Survey.

Source: All Africa.com