Top health officer at Bwiam General Hospital has said one of the key challenges of the hospital is understaffing with doctors and nurses saying the ratio of patients to nurses and doctors is more than ten.

Fatou Kah, a registered midwife and acting principal nursing officer, was speaking to Gambiana exclusively at the hospital.

She said: “ The number one challenge is human resource, we don’t have enough staff when it comes to nursing, lab personnel because we only have two lab technicians and the work is too much on them and currently one of them is on leave.

“We want to do quality work but we cannot do it without putting the right people at the right place, if we have at least five lab technicians it will be better.”

“Then in every shift there can be one. The ratio of nurses per patient, I know that there is a big gap, approximately we can say 20, at least in every shift one patient should be attended by one nurse and we now are trying to deliver quality, we want everybody to be delivered by skilled personnel,” Ms Kah added.

“Sometimes we will have five deliveries per-day and sometimes two people can be fully dilated at the same time so that person delivers those two together. 

“In the area of breastfeeding, when they are in the hospital, we have less problems because the nurses are coaching, teaching and advising them. 

“But once they leave the hospital, we all know at our homes where they will use this local charm on the baby to drink. Atleast, we keep them there for 24hours so that the baby can be breastfed.

“We only have two doctors attending to all gynaecology cases one of them will be doing the scanning and the other one will be doing ward rounds to see other antenatal, postpartum patients,” she continued

Reporting by Adama Makasuba