59% of deliveries in T.N. happened at government health facilities: Health Minister
He was inaugurating a workshop in Chennai on ‘Connecting the Missing Dots’ to discuss measures needed to reduce maternal deaths in the State
In Tamil Nadu, 99.9% of deliveries take place in a health facility, of which 59% happen in government institutions, according to Health Minister Ma. Subramanian.
After inaugurating a workshop in Chennai on ‘Connecting the Missing Dots’ to discuss measures needed to reduce maternal deaths in the State on Monday, he said the State’s institutional deliveries stood at 99.9% (8.70 lakh deliveries). A reason to cheer is that 59% deliveries have taken place at government health facilities, he said, adding that, “Out of this, 80% of deliveries have taken place in the Comprehensive Emergency Obstetric and Newborn Care centres.”
Mr. Subramanian said the State’s Maternal Mortality Ratio (MMR) was currently 45.5 per one lakh live births. This was due to various measures taken, including improvements in infrastructure and quality of healthcare and doctors’ contributions.
Health Secretary Supriya Sahu said Norway had the lowest MMR at 1.8 per one lakh live births, while other European countries, such as Sweden and Finland, also having achieved the gold standard of having a single-digit MMR. “Tamil Nadu is also looking to bring down the MMR to a single-digit”, she said.
Analysing decadal data (2014 to 2024), she said that of the total 6,008 maternal deaths, 4,464 (74%) deaths occurred during the postnatal period. About 25% of mothers (1,469) died during the prenatal period.
Taking a look at the causes of the maternal deaths, Ms. Sahu said that 20% of the deaths were due to haemorrhage, 20% due to hypertension, 9% due to heart diseases, 8% due to sepsis, 1% due to diabetes, and 4% due to abortion-related issues.
Sepsis, she said, was institution-based and can be avoided, while haemorrhage and hypertension together contributed to 40% of the deaths. She recommended a five-pronged strategy — integrate maternal death audit learnings with maternal mortality prevention strategy, look at maternal deaths happening in the private sector, integrate learnings from other States into Tamil Nadu’s programme, for which seven teams were constituted to visit States, including Maharashtra, Gujarat, Telangana, and Kerala, coordinate with other departments such as social welfare and training, and capacity building of staff.
Maternal mortality is not a statistics. It is a socio-economic health issue that needs to be looked at in entirety, Ms. Sahu said.
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