Better Antenatal Care for Sierra Leone

I have just come back home from looking after my friend's three children. She was in hospital for two weeks after having a baby. She developed complications during pregancy which meant that her baby had to be delievered by caesarean section and she spent a week in a High Dependency Unit. It made me think. Had she been in Sierra Leone where 1 in 8 pregnant women die during pregancy and childbirth, she certainly would have died. It is true that most pregnancies go without a hitch and only about 15% of women develop complications during pregnancy. But the problem is that in Sierra Leone not many women have proper antenatal care. So those women who are at risk of developing complications are missed and also because there is a critical shortage of trained/skilled birth attendants, many women are giving birth in dangerous situations. Of course we at HealthySalone do not just point out problems, we also plan to tackle them.
We are launching our Buy a Brick Campaign to raise £2 million to build a state of the art Women and Children's Centre in one of the biggest hospitals in the capital city. The centre will have an antenatal care unit, a fetal medicine unit, a delivery suite, post natal care suite, specialist care baby unit and a community midwife service. We will train needed maternity and paediatric staff. In fact this will be the first time in a long time that will Sierra Leone will have trained paediatric nurses.
The future is bright for healthcare in Sierra Leone. If you want to help us please go to www.healthysalone.org.uk or email kushe@healthysalone.org.uk for more information.
Together, we can change the future.