The Ghana Health Services and its partners like the World Health Organization have called for intensive and radical action in addressing the nation's maternal and child mortality rates which keep increasing in spite of numerous interventions. They maintain this could be possible if health workers scale up their best medical practices to save women and their babies from dying prematurely. The Director of Family Health Division of the Service, Gloria Quansah Asare, made the call at the opening of the 2008 National Reproductive and Child Health Annual Review Meeting at Busua in the Ahanta West district yesterday. The five-day meeting which was officially opened by the deputy Western regional minister, Wetsy Bosumtwi-Sam, is under the theme 'Reducing Maternal and Child mortality; scaling up best practices'. It is being attended by more than sixty health workers throughout the country. According to Dr Asare, statistics indicate that maternal and child mortality in Ghana continues to rise in spite of numerous interventions put in place by the GHS and its partners over the years to reduce if not curb it, a situation which calls for radical action in its solution. She said the current figure for institutional maternal mortality stands at 451 per 100,000 pregnant women as against the 186 recorded in the year 2006. Some 227 babies out of 100,000 live births recorded in 2007 also died. Identifying family planning, skilled attendance, comprehensive abortion care as well as adolescent health and development as some of the major areas requiring prompt attention, Dr Asare said efforts in determining the causes of deaths, utilisation of health services and putting in place best health care practices would go a long way in reversing this trend of affairs. She said this would also assist health workers in tracking their progress towards national goals and Millennium. Source: The Statesman