News and Events
Guidelines for safe motherhood in remote areas
To help address the particular difficulties women in remote areas experience in accessing maternity care, the government has produced a set of Remote Area Guidelines, based on inputs from key safe motherhood partners and experts. The aim is to ensure women living in remote areas have access to professional care during pregnancy and delivery, and in the event of complications are able to reach life-saving emergency services in time. In view of the low population densities in mountain and hill areas, it is not practical to provide sophisticated emergency obstetric care locally, and even normal delivery services are constrained by severe shortages of skilled staff. The guidelines therefore cover a range of practical interventions, such as improving local health facilities, increasing provision of outreach clinic services, establishing maternity waiting homes near health facilities so that village women can stay within easy reach of care prior to the birth, home based preventative measures (including misoprostol), emergency transport arrangements (including reservation of aircraft seats for obstetric emergencies) and establishment of emergency funds.
Case study: Maternal death in the mountains
Sanomaya died at Mugu District Hospital early in the morning. She was 17 years old and eight months into her first pregnancy. The day before, she had gone to work in the field and came back home in the early afternoon with bleeding. Initially she refused to go to the hospital as she thought she would get better with rest. However, this proved not to be the case, and late that night her family brought her to the hospital, bleeding heavily. The hospital put her on an intravenous drip and kept her in bed, planning to send her to the regional hospital in Surkhet the next morning, on the first available flight. Sadly, she died before daybreak, as a result of shock and the heavy bleeding. SSMP/ UMN reports 2009
08/03/2010
Ashima Shrestha
SSMP
