Definition of Safe Motherhood:
Safe motherhood encompasses a series of initiatives, practices, protocols and service delivery guidelines designed to ensure that women receive high-quality gynecological, family planning, prenatal, delivery and postpartum care, in order to achieve optimal health for the mother, fetus and infant during pregnancy, childbirth and postpartum. Safe motherhood d means ensuring that all women receive the care they need to be safe and healthy throughout pregnancy and childbirth.
Safe motherhood means a suitable environment to save the life of the mothers. That means-
- Woman will decide whether she will be pregnant or not.
- If she is pregnant she should get facilities related to pregnancy problem.
- She should get trained midwifery person during delivery.
- Emergency obstetric care during need.
- Relevant care during puerperium.
Importance of Safe Motherhood:
Safe motherhood is so important due to the below reasons:
- Every minute of every day take away another life of a mother.
- Every year more than half a million women die from complications in pregnancy and childbirth.
- Over 300 million suffer from avoidable illness and disability.
- Nearly all maternal deaths (99%) occur in the developing world.
Roles of Midwife to Establish Safe Motherhood:
Roles of a midwife to establish safe motherhood initiative are:
- Help to promote basic maternal health services by taking active participation.
- Provide quality antenatal care to the pregnant mother.
- Preparation for healthy family life.
- Standard record keeping.
- Care during pregnancy.
- Identification of pregnant women.
- Identify high risk pregnancies and take immediate measures.
- Provide primary care in hypertension in pregnancy and anemia in pregnancy.
- Antenatal mother’s monitoring and examination.
- Abdominal palpation.
- Provide domiciliary maternal health care, services.
- Identify the cases for admission in secondary and tertiary hospitals.
- Provide EOC.
- Management of prolonged second stage of labour with foetal distress.
- Care after delivery.
- Immediate care of the new born first 2 hours after delivery.
- Care of mother and baby in the post natal period.
- Provide essential care during delivery and ensure safe delivery.
- Life-saving management of bleeding in pregnancy and after delivery.
- Life-saving management of eclampsia.
- Counsel people to adopt family planning.
Maternal Conditions in Bangladesh:
Current maternal conditions in Bangladesh are-
- Maternal death: 320 per 100000 live birth.
- About 11,000 to 12,000 women dying from pregnancy or childbirth complications every year in Bangladesh.
- The estimated life time risk of dying from pregnancy and childbirth related causes in Bangladesh is 1 in 21 compared to 1 in over 4,000 in 6 industrialized countries.
- High rates of maternal morbidity and mortality continue to be important challenges for Bangladesh health systems are three million mothers become pregnant each year.
- Out of which 600,000 are expected to develop complications.
- About nine million women suffer from lasting complications such as Fistula, Prolapse, inability in controlling urination, or painful intercourse.
Maria Khatun Mona is a Founder and Editor of Nursing Exercise Blog. She is a Nursing and Midwifery Expert. Currently she is working as a Registered Nurse at Evercare Hospital, Dhaka, Bangladesh. She has great passion in writing different articles on Nursing and Midwifery. Mail her at “maria.mona023@gmail.com”