By Prof Glen Mola head of obs and gynae.
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Dear PNG-NCD community,

PMGH is just not coping with the load of patients in just about every department of the hospital. I would like to write about the maternity section. Last year we had over 14,000 births in our 24 bed delivery suite.

We do not have the space, we do not have the resources and we do not have the staff to look after all these women properly.

Port Moresby is the only capital city in the world (of size more than half a million people) with only one public hospital. For our size we should have at least 3 large public hospitals and a number of functional district hospitals as well in the city.

We have tried on many occasions and over a span of 20+ years to build the capacity of Gerehu hospital, but even today there is no public maternity section at the Gerehu hospital.

PMGH is meant to be the national referral and teaching hospital, but it has to operate at the level of primary care, because there are no level 4 or 5 hospitals in Port Moresby for women to go to have a safe supervised birth.

This means that at PMGH we are swamped with thousands of women having essentially normal birth (but requiring careful observation for any obstetric or newborn emergency), and this often means that we do not have the space or the staff available to properly look after the very high risk and problematic and extremely dangerous pregnancies properly.

Can the government please stop building prestige (look at me) projects, and put resources into the ordinary care facilites that ordinary people need every day please.

We have the health planning capacity to do the appropriate health planning but we continued to be stymied by inappropriate agendas of high tech (that is necessary for the rare complications), but not required by the great majority of citizens needing health care at regular intervals in their lives.

Professor Glen Mola, Head of Obs and Gyn SMHS-PMGH

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