More than two decades after the launch of the Safe Motherhood Initiative, maternal health in many developing countries has shown little or no improvement. Year after year, more than half a million mothers continue to die in silence. The specificities of the complex cross-cutting issue only partly explain why tireless efforts have led to insufficient progress so far. While some success stories p...

Strategic priority setting and implementation of strategies to reduce maternal mortality are key to the post Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 2015 agenda. This article highlights the feasibility and the advantages of using a systematized tacit knowledge approach, using data from maternal health program personnel, to identify local challenges to implementing policies and programs to inform the ...

Progress towards the Millennium Development Goal No. 5 was measured by an indicator that excluded women who died due to pregnancy and childbirth after 42 days from the date of delivery. These women suffered from what are defined as late deaths and sequelae-related deaths (O96 and O97 respectively, according to the International Classification of Diseases, 10th revision). Such deaths end up not ...

BACKGROUND The delays in receiving adequate emergency maternal care described by Thaddeus and Maine twenty years ago are still occurring, as exemplified in this study of cases of maternal deaths in a subdistrict in rural eastern Indonesia. METHODS An ethnographic design was conducted, recruiting eleven families who reported on cases of maternal deaths in one sub-district of Indonesia, as well...

OBJECTIVE To analyze recent trends in maternal mortality by sociodemographic characteristics and cause of death and to evaluate data quality. METHODS This observational study compared data from 2008-2009 with 2013-2014 for 27 states and the District of Columbia that had comparable reporting of maternal mortality throughout the period. Maternal mortality rates were computed per 100,000 live bi...

OBJECTIVES The primary objective of this study is to study Maternal Mortality as per Gravidity among Tribal women at a tertiary level of care in Bastar, Chhattisgarh, India. MATERIALS AND METHODS This is a hospital based ,retrospective, reproductive-age mortality study (RAMOS) of tribal women of Bastar region, Chhattisgarh, that were admitted and managed in Obstetrics and Gynecology Departmen...

Gujarat state of India has come a long way in improving the health indicators since independence, but progress in reducing maternal mortality has been slow and largely unmeasured or documented. This case study identified several challenges for reducing the maternal mortality ratio, including lack of the managerial capacity, shortage of skilled human resources, non-availability of blood in rural...

BACKGROUND Health institutions need to contribute their quota towards the achievement of the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) with respect to maternal health. In order to do so, current data on maternal mortality is essential for careproviders and policy makers to appreciate the burden of the problem and understand how best to distribute resources. This study presents the magnitude and distrib...

BACKGROUND The causes of maternal death are now classified internationally according to ICD-MM. One significant change with the introduction of ICD-MM in 2012 was the reclassification of maternal suicide from the indirect group to the direct group. This has led to concerns about the impact of this reclassification on calculated mortality rates. The aim of this analysis was to examine the trends...

context maternal serum human chorionic gonadotropin (hcg) and alpha fetal protein (afp) were originally introduced to detect trisomy 21 and neural tube defects. however, in the absence of aneuploidy or neural tube defects, mid-trimester maternal serum hcg and/or maternal serum afp associated with adverse pregnancy outcomes. pregnancies with unexplained mid-trimester elevation in maternal serum ...