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Brought in Dead: An Avoidable Delay in Maternal Deaths

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Abstract

Purpose

Maternal brought in dead are the patient who dies in the need of adequate medical care. These deaths are often not analyzed sincerely as they are not institutional deaths. Our aim is to find out actual life threatening cause of delay leading to death.

Method

Patients brought dead to casualty were seen by the doctors on duty in Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology,Gandhi Medical College, Bhopal round the clock. Cause of death was analyzed by verbal autopsy of attendants and referral letter from the institute. In this analytical study a complete evaluation of brought deaths from January 2011 to Decmeber 2014 was done.

Results

A total of 64 brought in deaths were reported in this 4 year duration. Most common cause of death was postpartum hemorrhage (54.68 %) followed by hypertension (15.62 %) and the most common cause of delay was delay in getting adequate treatment (56.25 %).

Conclusion

The brought in dead are the indicator of the three delays in getting health care. Challenges appear to be enormous to be tackled. Timely management proves to be critical in preventing maternal death. Thus it appears that community education about pregnancy and its complications, EmOC training at FRU and strict adherence to referral protocol may help us to reduce the brought dead burden.

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Notes

  1. https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_on_arrival.

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Acknowledgments

We acknowledge our teaching staff, students, the nursing and the secretarial staff at Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Gandhi Medical College, Bhopal, for their respective assistances in the preparation of this manuscript.

Authors’ contributions

A Kumar: Project development and Manuscript writing. N Agrawal: Manuscript writing, Data collection, and analysis.

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Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Neha Agrawal.

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Conflict of interest

We have no financial relations with any organization. We have full control of all primary data and that we agree to allow the journal to review their data if requested. The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethics approval

Manuscripts submitted for publication are based on retrospective data analysis as per ethics with the consent of using stored data from the hospital authority, which has therefore been performed in accordance with the ethical standards laid down in the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments. Details that might disclose the identity of the subjects under study are omitted.

Additional information

Aruna Kumar is Professor and Head and Neha Agrawal is Senior Resident at Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Gandhi Medical College, Bhopal, India.

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Kumar, A., Agrawal, N. Brought in Dead: An Avoidable Delay in Maternal Deaths. J Obstet Gynecol India 66 (Suppl 1), 60–66 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13224-015-0762-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13224-015-0762-1

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