Maternal Care Information System

Abstract

It is estimated that ten million women all over the world present with complications related to pregnancy every year, with 500,000 maternal deaths and eight million annual perinatal deaths. Reductions of maternal and infant mortality rates are two components of millennium development goals. Optimal medical treatment can largely improve their survival when they experience complications related to pregnancy or childbirth. It is very important to gather data on maternal deaths immediately to implement life saving interventions. Currently data on maternal deaths are collected manually. It leads to a delay in reporting maternal deaths, low quality data and also there is no system to update data. The aim of this project is to gather maternal death data rapidly, analyze them and take immediate lifesaving interventions. Increasing the quality of maternal care using reliable sources of data is another objective. The required data are gathered from the Provincial Directors of Health Services (PDHS), Deputy Provincial Directors of Health Services (DPDHS), Medical Officers of Health (MOH), Judicial Medical Officers (JMO), Public Health Midwifes (PHM), and Hospitals. Thereafter national maternal death reviews conducted at district levels each year with the representatives of Ministry of Health, College of Obstetrician and Gynecologist, Visiting Obstetrician and Gynecologists (VOG), hospital directors and doctors who undertook overall management of the mothers, MOHs’ of the relevant area, Director Maternal and Child Health (DMCH) and relevant officers of Family Health Bureau(FHB). Using gathered data and with the collaboration of the expert panel, a discussion on how each mother was managed by the hospital and at MOH level for each and every death will be conducted. The expert panel retrieves data on the management of each mother who died by questioning the doctors who managed them. The entire effort is made for the improvement of future management and not as a fault finding mission. Then the expert panel decides on the type of death of the mother (maternal or non maternal). These data will be used to calculate District Maternal Mortality Ratio of each district and National Maternal Mortality Ratio of each year at national level. A Graphical Information System is needed to represent those data and problems are identified according to the geographical locations too. Apart from the data collection and analysis, the system provides facilities to notify upcoming events organized by the FHB, educational information as well as a platform for effective communication including mobile phone technology.