Improving facility-based outcomes for mothers and newborns is achievable
Of the patients Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and other organisations treat in settings affected by conflict, neglect or disaster, most are women and children. In MSF’s facilities, they present against a backdrop of unacceptably high maternal and under-5 child mortality rates worldwide. Neonatal death in particular is seemingly intractable, growing to comprise 44% of all deaths of children aged under 5 years, or about three million deaths annually.1 Additionally, there are an estimated 2.7 million stillbirths each year, a large proportion occurring in the intrapartum period.2
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- 1. You D, Bastian, P, Wu J, Wardlaw T; United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation. Levels and trends in child mortality: report 2013. New York: United Nations Children’s Fund, 2013.
- 2. Lawn JE, Blencowe H, Pattinson R, et al. Stillbirths: Where? When? Why? How to make the data count? Lancet 2011; 377: 1448-1463.
- 3. Save the Children. Surviving the first day: state of the world’s mothers 2013. Westport, Conn: Save the Children, 2013.
- 4. United Nations Population Fund. Training midwives to care for the mothers of South Sudan [news]. 19 May 2011. http://www.unfpa.org/public/home/news/pid/7665 (accessed Jul 2013).
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