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UK deaths in childbirth – and pregnancy – increase

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Summary of story from Nursing Practice, August 10, 2011

The recent rise in the number of women in the UK dying during childbirth and pregnancy has led to a call from leading doctors for better training for GPs and for more obstetric physicians to be recruited in hospitals.

Published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), the concerns raised seem to correlate with a greater number of women who fall pregnant when they are older or when they are overweight, which puts them into the high-risk pregnancy category.

Catherine Nelson-Piercy, professor of obstetric medicine at King’s College London, said that such women can suffer a complex combination of health issues.

The Telegraph reports Professor Nelson-Piercy and her colleagues as saying in the BMJ that increasing numbers of women with often complex medical conditions are now becoming pregnant or seeking fertility treatment.

Women, they say, are delaying childbearing until later in life, and older women are more likely to be obese, have hypertension, or be predisposed to gestational diabetes and thromboembolism.

They added: “Most worryingly, the number of maternal deaths due to indirect causes has significantly increased over the past 20 years.”

“Furthermore, most of these deaths are associated with substandard care, and in one third of cases this is classified as major substandard care, where different care might have prevented death of the mother. These failings require urgent attention.”

“This often arises when well-meaning clinicians prioritise the health of the foetus over that of the mother, but it can result in the death of both mother and foetus.”

Alongside concerns around more vigilant care from GPs for women in high risk categories, there was also recognition that most deaths occur as a result of treatable medical conditions, and that more women are dying from conditions which are not directly related to pregnancy.

A Centre for Maternal and Child Enquiries (CMACE) report earlier in 2011 revealed that between 2006 and 2008, 261 women in Britain died from conditions directly or indirectly related to pregnancy.  Some 154 of these died of infections, underlying health problems and other indirect causes.

  1. vicki wharton says:

    I’m confused. Are these deaths being blamed on older and fat mothers or poor care. It says that most of these deaths were associated with sub standard care, with a third of them as a result of major poor care. I had my daughter aged 42 and can only describe the attitude of some of the ‘nursing’ staff towards patients as beneath contempt. I think the continuous media barracking of mothers as being too old, too young, too fat, too thin, too pissed, too unemployed, too drugged, too lazy, too neurotic – has turned mothers into a socially stigmatised group that is regarded by a large minority of people as being acceptable to hate.

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