Parirenyatwa Group of Hospitals has denied culpability in the death of an expecting mother and her baby at its Mbuya Nehanda Maternity Ward early on Sunday morning.
A neuro-surgeon, Maximilian Dzowa, carried out preliminary investigations into the death of Sharon Munyonho and concluded that an overwhelmed system was partly to blame.
Mbuya Nehanda Maternity Head of Division, Taazadza Nhemachena had this to say:
The socio-economic status of the country needs to be improved to eradicate poverty then everything falls into place, things for monitoring babies and mothers.
We are having low-risk women and high-risk women coming to Parirenyatwa Hospital which overwhelms the system so we end up with system failure and patients end up getting substandard care, we have deaths and mortalities even patients with complications.
The system has been overloaded and the nurse-patient ratio for instance in the labour ward should be 1:2 ideally but at the current moment one midwife is looking after four patients and the same case is there in other Wards before they go to labour which compromises monitoring.
A full report into on the incident is expected next week.