Kong community in dire need of clinic

Kong, a farming community in the Sawla-Tuna-Kalba District, has no access to a health facility to cater for the health needs of the residents. Pregnant women in the community have described the situation as dangerous for them to bear.

“It burdens us a lot to travel on motor bikes on a 25-kilometre journey to the Tuna Health Centre to access ante-natal services,” Madam Jahara Salifu, a pregnant woman told the Ghana News Agency at Kong on Saturday, during the coronation of Kongwura Seidu Adamu Jinkurge, Paramount Chief of the Kong Traditional Area.

Madam Salifu said pregnant women found it difficult to attend ante-natal services at the Tuna Health Centre, because their husbands had to carry them on motor bikes on a deplorable road, which sometimes caused them to deliver on the road, while those of them who were lucky to reach the Centre, delivered their babies dead.

She said between January and June this year, five pregnant women who were in labour and were being transported on motor bikes by their husbands to the Centre, delivered on the road.

She said those of them whose husbands had no motorbikes had to depend on the only Kia truck plying between Tuna and Kong, to get to the centre for ante-natal services.

Madam Salifu, who is pregnant, lamented how she would deliver if her time was due, saying: “It would be difficult for me to guess where I would delivery; maybe on the road”.

“The cost of transporting patients to the centre is high, and above the means of many husbands in the community”, she said, adding: “ It is only a few husbands in the community, who can afford to buy fuel and pay motor riders to send their wives to the Centre for ante-natal services”.

Madam Salifu appealed to government and development partners to provide a health facility for the community, to help the people to access quality healthcare services