3 - Beyond the Numbers: reviewing maternal deaths and disabilities to make pregnancy safer

Summary

Whose faces are behind the numbers? What were their stories? What were their dreams? They left behind children and families. They also left behind clues as to why their lives ended early.

Introduction

This chapter briefly describes how maternal death or severe morbidity reviews, as described in the World Health Organization (WHO) publication Beyond the Numbers: Reviewing Maternal Deaths and Disabilities to Make Pregnancy Safer (BTN), can save mothers' and newborns' lives as well as help to reduce severe maternal and neonatal morbidity. The purpose of the reviews is to assess and identify any underlying factors that may have contributed to mothers' deaths and to learn lessons from these to develop and promulgate recommendations to improve access to, and the quality of, maternity care in future. The methodologies can be used at national, regional, local or community level and take a number of forms. The technique chosen will depend on the specific local circumstances, the scope and scale of the proposed study, and the size of the population under review. Implementation of the guidelines and recommendations can improve access to, and the quality of, maternity care for all pregnant or recently delivered women and their infants.

Background

If governments are to redouble their efforts to make an impact on reducing their maternal death rates by 75% by 2015, as set out in the United Nations Millennium Development Goal 5 (MDG ₅), they need better information about exactly why and where their mothers are dying, who they are, and what might be done to remedy this.