Maternal Mortality – Separating Signal from Noise

By AMEYA KULKARNI, MD

When Samuel Morse left his New Haven home to paint a portrait of the
Maquis du Lafayette in Washington DC, it was the last time he would see his
pregnant wife. Shortly after his arrival in Washington, his wife developed
complications during childbirth. A messenger took several days on horseback to
relay the message to Mr Morse. Because the trip back to New Haven took several
more, his wife had died by the time he arrived at their home.  So moved was he by the tragedy of lost time
that he dedicated the majority of the rest of his life to make sure that this
would never happen to anyone again. His subsequent work on the telegraph and in
particular the mechanism of communication for the telegraph resulted in Morse
code – the first instantaneous messaging system in the world.

Mr Morse’s pain is not foreign to us in the 21st century. We feel the loss of new mothers so deeply that, when earlier this year new statistics on the rate of maternal death were released and suggested that American women died at three times the rate of other developed countries during child birth, doctors, patient advocates, and even Congress seemed willing to move heaven and earth to fix the problem. As someone who cares for expectant mothers at high risk for cardiovascular complications, I too was moved. But beyond the certainty of the headlines lay the nuance of the data, which seemed to tell a murkier story.

First at issue was the presentation of the data. Certain...

Source: The Health Care Blog - December 3, 2019 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Christina Liu Tags: Health Policy Medical Practice Ameya Kulkarni Global Health Maternal mortality public health Source Type: blogs