Urgent Delivery Needed

Delivery room - Canitoan Village Health Centre

We are back in the Philippines to catch up with some of the projects that we are already involved in and to meet with new people to discuss whether we may be able to help them.

Today saw us visiting the village health centre in the Barangay of Canitoan - just a couple of miles outside of Cagayan De Oro City - which serves a growing local population, currently of about 15,000 people with bassic maternity care, dentistry, family planning advice and an immunization program. The local church pastor explained that many of the residents are subsistence farmers who struggle to make ends meet and for whom it is difficult to afford proper medical services.

The midwife proudly showed us two little rooms that she uses and where she has now started to do deliveries instead of sending expectant mothers to one of the large hospitals or private "birthing homes" in the city centre.

In the larger outer room stood a simple wooden slat bed with a foam mattress where women who are in labour can wait. In the tiny inner cubicle, measuring about 7 feet by 5 feet, is a single delivery bed (with it's cloths stained with dried blood) and a couple of old wooden tables with plastic table cloths and a small collection of instruments in a two bowls, plus a bucket on the floor and an angle poise lamp. On the wall a hand drawn chart gives a guide to cervix dilation sizes so that the midwife can gauge the progress of the delivery.

We asked the midwife what happened if two women were in labour at the same time? "We would make a space on the floor for the other one!", she said simply. I was unsure exactly where the space could be made, except in the outer room!

Outside in the office, on a table, lay the only sphygmomanometer (blood pressure meter) for use by 13 health workers. Unfortunately it was broken and they have no money to replace it.

We urgently need to get a couple of midwifery delivery kits into this centre and, in the longer term, we talked with the Barangay councillors and the midwife about the possibility of providing more medical equipment. The acting head of the council (now in his early seventies) explained that in 1998 they had a five year plan to establish a "mini-hospital" for the village but 12 years on they still had not been able to fulfill that dream.

Our desire for 2010, with help from Aid To Hospitals Worldwide, is to ship a 40 foot container of medical aid to this area, and it seems that this little clinic at Canitoan would be an ideal recipient for some of that aid. Who would like to help us make an old man's dream come true?