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Pregnant women in the Birim Central Municipality have to queue for long periods now at the Oda Government Hospital theatre in order to access the facility. The Birim Central Municipal Director of Health Services, Ms Anastasia Atiogbe, disclosed this when the Ghana News Agency�s Media Auditing and Tracking of Development Projects team paid a courtesy call on her at Oda. Statistics She said the hospital recorded 4,112 antenatal cases in 2013, with 3,801 of them delivering at the hospital, while 311 deliveries were conducted by traditional birth attendants (TBA). She said the hospital recorded four maternal deaths in 2013, a situation which the hospital's management found worrying. Miss Atiogbe noted that the hospital�s theatre could not take care of the number of pregnant women who came there daily to access the facility. According to her, the multi-purpose theatre, which is about 90 years old, has not seen any expansion since it was built. The small-room theatre served as a changing room, scrub room, recovery ward, as well as an operation theatre, a-not-too-favourable condition that perverted the hospital�s mandate of providing quality health care, considering the number of patients always on hand, she observed. The director said due to this, the doctors normally took care of patients whose conditions were critical before attending to the others. She opined that the theatre had become outmoded and the number of patients was just too many for it, adding that there were few beds in the maternity ward, with many pregnant women lying on the bare floor, a situation the director of health described as dehumanising. Appeal for support Miss Atiogbe, therefore, appealed for support to solve the problem at the theatre and the maternity ward in order to create a congenial atmosphere for pregnant women and other patients who visit the facility. She enumerated a number of challenges confronting health delivery in the area, which included inadequate vehicles and motorbikes for proper and frequent supervision and shortage of family planning kits at the regional medical stores, thus, limiting their family planning activities. She said 39 positive tuberculosis (TB) cases were detected last year with a treatment success rate of 82 per cent, and malaria, a major disease in the area, recorded significant reduction in cases reported to the facility. She said despite those challenges, management was determined to make the hospital one of the best in the country to provide quality curative and regenerative health care to the people of Birim Central and beyond through the use of modern and evidence-based methods of healthcare delivery.