On the occasion of African Child Day, President Maada Bio commissioned two renovated Basic Emergency Obstetric and Newborn Care (BEmONC) facilities for Falaba and Masandu on June 16.
President Bio stated in his keynote address that when he turned the sod for the building of these two Basic Emergency Obstetric and Newborn Care HealthFacilities in January 2020 he was of the firm conviction that the people of Falaba District deserved better healthcare service delivery. “My belief was influenced by the terrible event of Falaba residents commuting from Falaba to Kalaba Town for Gynaecology and Obstetrics Care Services,” he explained.
According to President Bio, the team has worked tirelessly over the previous two years, despite the Covid-19 constraints and the difficult terrain, to guarantee that this project is completed within the time frame specified. “This is because this project is special to me in the same manner that Falaba District is precious to me.”
“What we become as a nation rests on our ability to empower the poorest of our population,” President Bio stated. At the core of this empowerment, we must enable our residents to live healthy, productive lives, which necessitates that our health facilities satisfy our society’s medical needs.”
He went on to say that in order to safeguard the community from the threat of sickness and illness, our physicians, nurses, and staff mus
t be equipped with the knowledge and skills necessary to assure the well-being of the people they serve. This includes ensuring that our medical practitioners, as well as our medical institutions, are among the most devoted in the world. President Bio further stated that his administration is dedicated to providing access to inexpensive and high-quality healthcare services. “We have built a coordinating secretariat for the Sierra Leone Social Health Insurance (SLeSHI) — a health insurance plan that would boost access to health care, particularly for our impoverished people,” he says. We are now finalizing plans to publicly launch the health insurance system.”
President Bio emphasized that universal access to Emergency Obstetric and Newborn Care is critical to reducing maternal mortality and that “all pregnant women and newborns with complications must have rapid access to well-functioning facilities that include a diverse range of service delivery types and settings.”
According to the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS 2013) report, Sierra Leone’s maternal death rate was 1,165 per 100,000. With the help of the government and development partners such as the Islamic Development Bank, that bleak projection has been lowered to 717 over 100,000 live births in 2019. Under-five mortality in the nation was 156 per 1,000 live births in 2013. This, too, fell to 122, while newborn mortality fell from 92 in 2013 to 122 in 2014.
