The Health ministry has seen the use of such services rise from 32 per cent of needful consultation in 2015 to 43 per cent in the course of this year, which is definitely an encouraging situation. But the change did not result from routine awareness such as by having more meetings or more seminars, but thanks to the contribution or input of numerous facilities.
Uptake of family planning services was largely due to the taking of such services closer to the needy rural population in particular, with the construction of numerous health facilities in various regions and districts.
Ensuring the safe delivery of newborns is usually the first order of concern, where facilities have more than doubled during the period. There are often some logistical challenges when new facilities come up or services are upgraded but, on the whole, there is quite simply an entirely different situation countrywide.
Availability of clinical facilities also went in hand with ensuring basic medical supplies are made available in hospitals, health centres and dispensaries, even as they became more numerous than earlier.
The pivotal measure in that sphere was to cut out the role of middlemen in importing medical drugs and supplying them to hospital facilities, as there were too many loopholes in the supply chain. Much of this has been closed off and medicinal supplies are more available in hospitals than earlier – and at more affordable prices.
With considerable advances in capacity building in the health sector, it is clear that cases of requiring referral services could also be diminishing even as facilities are increased, as more qualified medical personnel are distributed in regional capitals and districts.
There are even novel methods that are now becoming more widespread, like incubation that has to do with the mother providing the basic assistance to the baby via the so-called kangaroo method. This involves the care of preterm infants where the infant is carried by the mother, with skin-to-skin contact, as a substitute for incubation.
Being able to take care of most complications during pregnancy and child birth makes all the difference between mothers being able to live and take care of their infants, or something else happening.
Tanzania has arguably been making steady progress in that sphere such that at a certain point former president Jakaya Kikwete was appointed to chair a global panel on the monitoring of efforts to curb maternal mortality, a morbid overhang on mothers in poor countries, and vastly in Africa.
The preliminary step is to make sure that working facilities for expectant mothers and extending appropriate assistance to newborns are close to neighbourhoods.
The size of the challenge is still quite big, as UN data indicate that an estimated 303,000 women died worldwide in 2015 from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth.
With around two-thirds of these maternal deaths occurring in sub-Saharan Africa, it is evident that building health centres in all villages and good hospitals in all districts is neither an authoritarian outlook nor an electoral ploy.
Rather, it in many ways decides whether a mother will live or die, especially if she did not have preliminary clinical facilities during pregnancy. Having thousands of women dying in childbirth is simply unacceptable.
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