CLINICAL GOVERNANCE - 'Newborn Care: Where do newborns die?

courtesy of HIFA and CHIFA, we share this harrowing information even though we may know about it already. No matter how many times we read it, it remains a bane on the conscience of the countries named -

'‘[chifa] Newborn Care: Where do newborns die?

19 Jan at 13:39

One of our unanswered questions from the last thematic discussion on Newborn care was: What do we know about newborn deaths at global and national levels? Which countries are doing better than others of comparable levels of income?

The publication Levels and Trends in Child Mortality (noted by Mary Kinney) provides the latest data on the geography of childmortailty. For example:

'Two regions account for almost 80 per cent of the newborn deaths in 2016 – Southern Asia accounted for 39 per cent of all such deaths and sub-Saharan Africa accounted for 38 per cent (Table 4). At the country level, half of all neonatal deaths are concentrated in fve countries, namely, India (24 per cent), Pakistan (10 per cent), Nigeria (9 per cent), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (4 per cent) and Ethiopia (3 per cent). India and Pakistan alone accounted for about a third of all newborn deaths.'

What we don't know is at what level in the health system these deaths occur, nor much about the quality of care (obstetric and/or neontal) that underlies these deaths (although we can of course identify the major medical causes of death and we know that most of these deaths couldhave been prevented with appropriate obstetric and/or neontal care.

It seems to me we know less about newborn mortality than we do about mortality at any other point in the human lifespan.  By  Best wishes, Neil

Fulltext: http://www.childmortality.org/files_v21/download/IGME%20report%202017%20child%20mortality%20final.pdf’

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