Maternal mortality in a referral hospital of Northern India - A sixteen-year review

Abstract

Maternal death has been recognized as an area of maternity care that requires urgent attention. The most striking feature about maternal health today is the extraordinary difference in maternal death rates between developed and developing countries. Maternal mortality has reached an irreducible minimum in the developed world, whereas it remains alarmingly high in developing countries. In the developed countries, the risk to a woman of dying from pregnancy-related causes is between one in 4,000 and one in 10,000. The corresponding risk for a woman in developing countries is between one in 15 and one in 50.The analysis of maternal deaths in developing countries is incomplete due to paucity of data and unsatisfactory record keeping leading to a lack of national level data.