Facility based study of near miss obstetric events in two tertiary care hospitals of belagavi

Abstract

Every year millions of women around the world suffer from pregnancy, childbirth and postpartum complication. Approximately 810 women die every day worldwide from preventable causes related to pregnancy and delivery. Maternal mortality is considered as ‘Just the tip of iceberg’ the base to iceberg is Maternal Near Miss (MNM) morbidity, that remains undescribed. The concept of Severe Acute Maternal Morbidityor near miss was aptly developed for the present health care system. World Health Organization (WHO) has defined “near - miss” as a woman, who being close to death, survives a complication that occurred during pregnancy, delivery or up to 42 days after the termination of her pregnancy. The WHO near-miss approach is a standardized method which is implemented based on organ system dysfunction which incorporates clinical, laboratory and management based criteria for identifying maternal near miss cases. This transition from studying maternal mortality to morbidity has created a worldwide trend since the absolute number of deaths is relatively less compared to the maternal morbidity cases with poor quality of life. The present study was planned to assess the occurrence of severe maternal morbidity in two tertiary care hospitals of Belagavi, Karnataka as proposed by the WHO near miss approach and to examine the implementation levels of key evidence based interventions in women expressing severe maternal morbidity and mortality