OBJECTIVE To determine the causes and characteristics of maternal deaths in HIV-infected women. DESIGN A retrospective study of maternal deaths in a cohort of HIV-infected women. SETTING A facility-based maternal death review using case records and mortality summaries. METHODS Thirty seven maternal deaths which occurred in HIV-infected women were reviewed in a university teaching hospital...

BACKGROUND In places with poor vital registration, measurement of maternal mortality and monitoring the impact of interventions on maternal mortality is difficult and seldom undertaken. Mortality ratios are often estimated and policy decisions made without robust evidence. This paper presents a prospective key informant system to measure maternal mortality and the initial findings from the syst...

BACKGROUND Maternal mortality, as a largely avoidable cause of death, is an important focus of international development efforts, and a target for Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 5. However, data weaknesses have made monitoring progress problematic. In 2006, a new maternal mortality working group was established to develop improved estimation methods and make new estimates of maternal mortali...

We used the Lives Saved Tool (LiST) to estimate deaths averted if midwifery was scaled up in 78 countries classified into three tertiles using the Human Development Index (HDI). We selected interventions in LiST to encompass the scope of midwifery practice, including prepregnancy, antenatal, labour, birth, and post-partum care, and family planning. Modest (10%), substantial (25%), or universal ...

BACKGROUND Family planning is one of the four pillars of the Safe Motherhood Initiative to reduce maternal death in developing countries. We aimed to estimate the effect of contraceptive use on maternal mortality and the expected reduction in maternal mortality if the unmet need for contraception were met, at country, regional, and world levels. METHOD We extracted relevant data from the Mate...

SUMMARY BACKGROUND To improve access to skilled attendance at delivery and thereby reduce maternal mortality, the Government of Ghana introduced a policy exempting all women attending health facilities from paying delivery care fees. OBJECTIVE To examine the effect of the exemption policy on delivery-related maternal mortality. METHODS Maternal deaths in 9 and 12 hospitals in the Central Re...

In 1916, there were 774 pregnancy-related deaths per 100,000 live births in North Carolina; by 1999 this ratio had declined to 12.3 deaths/100,000 live births (See Figure 1). Over the same time span, the annual number of pregnancy-related deaths decreased from 593 to 14. The decline in pregnancy-related deaths (based on death certificate records) is attributed to improved obstetrical care and p...

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...

SETTING The Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, University Teaching Hospital, Lusaka, Zambia. OBJECTIVES To ascertain 1) the non-obstetric causes of maternal mortality, 2) the importance of tuberculosis as a cause of maternal deaths, and 3) the trends in the aetiology of non-obstetric causes of maternal deaths during the past decade in the light of the human immunodeficiency virus epide...

The first target of the fifth United Nations Millennium Development Goal is to reduce maternal mortality by 75% between 1990 and 2015. This target is critically off track. Despite difficulties inherent in measuring maternal mortality, interventions aimed at reducing it must be monitored and evaluated to determine the most effective strategies in different contexts. In some contexts, the direct ...