Group wants to become voice for women healthcare

The Star KUCHING: The Obstetrical and Gynaecological Society of Malaysia (OGSM) hopes to brand itself as the voice for women healthcare in the country.

Consultant Obstetrician and Gynaecologist Dr Gunasegaran P.T Rajan said this was necessary to help lower health risks thus reducing deaths caused by complications during childbirth.

“We hope to be the one to provide the data and information on women’s healthcare, playing a supporting role to the Health Ministry. So in a way, we are trying to brand ourselves towards this,” he said at the 10th Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists International Scientific Congress here yesterday.

He said the Government had taken a new role whereby everyone had a right to information and healthcare and so standard guidelines were being placed to inform patients and get them involved in the decision-making process.

“For example, on caesarean section. Ten years ago we will tell mothers that they need a c-section and that’s that. But now, as early as possible we will let them know what to expect and the complications that comes from it. So with this, women are taking charge of their own health and they become part of the decision-making process along with the doctors,” he said.

Dr Gunasegaran, who is the organising chairman for the congress, listed three most common emergency – bleeding during childbirth, embolism and pre-eclampsia or hypertension during pregnancy.

He said in Malaysia, 200 mothers died every year during childbirth and this translated to 27 deaths per 100,000 births.

He said the best figure worldwide was 10 deaths per 100,000 birth and although the country’s figure was considered quite good, it still needed to be lowered.

“We are hoping that all this teachings and imparting skills will improve the figures and reduce deaths due to complications in childbirth,” he said.

Dr Gunasegaran said he did not have the exact figures for Sarawak but it could be around 30 deaths.

This, he said, was probably due to the geographical challenges of the state.

As such, he said, one of the steps that needed to be taken to avoid this was to identify high-risk pregnancies as early as possible and let these mothers knew that they needed to be at the hospital during delivery.

“Of course, this is still not easy because nobody would want to leave their home and it is also not easy to bring a specialist and a team over to the interior.

“Another way is tele-medicine, whereby with modern technology and the Internet, information about childbirth, treatments and management advice gets passed on to the nurses over in the interior so they’ll know what to look out for,” he said.

Dr Gunasegaran still believed more needed to be put in place to get the necessary information across to the rural communities, especially in Sarawak.

He said educating women on their health and making them aware of the risk their health conditions had on childbirth was very crucial in lowering maternal mortality.

The society, he said, had organised life-saving skills courses on how to deal with emergencies – which when happened – could be fast and disastrous.

“We are also helping out our neighbours by holding such courses in Cambodia,” he added.

OGSM is an independent, non-profit and non-governmental organisation with affiliation to the International Federation of Gynaecology and Obstetrics and the Asia-Oceania Federation of Obstetrics and Gynaecology.

It was established in 1963 and today has some 800 members.