Healthcare workers overcome communication barrier to deliver baby of hearing and speech impaired woman at rural health centre in Kolhapur

25.12.2025
Kolhapur: Six staffers, including a doctor, a health visitor, three nurses and an ASHA worker, delivered a healthy baby for a hearing and speech-impaired woman at the Kasba Sangaon's primary health centre in Kolhapur district on Dec 20. They overcame the challenge of communication without the presence of a sign-language expert by relying on clinical analysis and gestures. The woman was admitted in the afternoon, and she gave birth eight hours later, at 10pm on Saturday night.

At the PHC, which is at the grassroots level of the public healthcare system, such cases are a rarity. The 25-year-old woman's husband was physically challenged and could not assist staff with communication, nor were any of her relatives present. An ambulance brought her to the PHC after she went into labour.

"We were not able to understand what pain she was going through as she was not able to convey it. We relied on clinical analysis to find out how she was doing. We had to use actions to show her how to get into labour. We had to squat so that she understood how to squat; otherwise, the wrong position may have caused the delivery of the baby in the bathroom. The problem was that the pain was insufferable to her, which worried us.

She had no hearing aid to understand what we were asking," said Vasundhara Deshmukh, the medical officer who led the delivery.

Deshmukh was assisted by Uma Bothe, a health visitor, and nurses Vidya Bidkar, Urmila Mohite and Urmila Bhangre, along with ASHA worker Manisha Devadkar.

This was the speech and hearing-impaired woman's second delivery. During her first pregnancy, she had been referred to CPR Hospital Kolhapur, a tertiary care facility. This time, travel was inadvisable because the CPR Hospital is around 55 km away, nearly an hour's journey. At PHCs, normal deliveries are carried out, while complicated and high-risk cases are referred to sub-district or district hospitals, where c-sections are generally performed.

Farukh Desai, the district reproductive and child care officer of Kolhapur, said, "In the past 10 years of my service in Kolhapur district, I never came across such a case at the PHC level. The doctors at the PHC, from the start, provided the service of sonography, medicines, and all tests free of cost to the pregnant woman. We are going to screen the baby for congenital anomalies with the help of an ENT specialist, as many parents have doubts in mind that if any one of them is speech and hearing impaired, then their babies too may get similar impairment hereditarily. In such cases, we carry out cochlear implants so that the baby may grow up listening and thereby may speak normally."