Our view: Reduce the USA’s shameful maternal death rates
YoLanda Mention, who had just given birth to a baby girl at one of South Carolina’s top hospitals, should probably be alive today.
But the 38-year-old wife and mother was sent home from the hospital in March 2015 with dangerously high blood pressure. That same night, she and her husband returned to the ER.
Though her blood pressure had climbed and she had an excruciating headache, she sat in the waiting room for hours, according to a lawsuit filed by her husband. By the time she was ushered into an exam room, she suffered a stroke. She died a few days later, leaving the couple’s three girls motherless.
The right treatment at the right time — IV medication that costs less than $60 a dose — could well have saved her.
Despite politicians’ claims that America has the best health care of any country, similar tragedies occur repeatedly across the United States, which today is the most dangerous place in the developed world to give birth.
You read that correctly. About 700 mothers in America die each year in childbirth, many of them needlessly — a maternal death rate far higher than that of other developed nations, including Canada, France, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom. An additional 50,000 mothers are severely injured each year in childbirth, USA TODAY found in an investigation published last week.
About half of these deaths could be prevented, and half the injuries reduced or eliminated, through simple changes in care that doctors, hospitals and medical experts have known about for years. Yet too many “hospitals and medical workers skip safety practices known to head off disaster,” USA TODAY’s Alison Young wrote.
High blood pressure is one leading killer and cause of injuries. The other is heavy blood loss during delivery, which often goes untreated until too late. Hemorrhaging can be diagnosed by checking for obvious danger signs and carefully measuring blood loss — rather than visually estimating it. Then lifesaving actions can be started in time.
Despite repeated failures even at highly rated hospitals, the federal agency and private groups that hold enormous leverage have not used that sway to fix this medical disaster.
When best practices are followed, deaths and injuries decline. California, where many hospitals have adopted standards established by experts, cut its maternal death rate in half from
2009 to 2015 — to 4.5 per 100,000 births. Meanwhile, deaths rose elsewhere and stand at a rate of 58.1 in Louisiana, the worst in the nation.
Easy steps are available to lessen deaths and injuries:
❚ Stop blaming patients. For decades, some hospitals and doctors, looking for excuses, have faulted women for being overweight or unhealthy, or blamed poverty or age as leading causes of complications, when one of the real culprits is failing to follow best practices.
❚ Learn from experts. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the AIM program (Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health) have put out recommendations and “safety bundles” with simple steps and timetables to follow.
❚ Go public. Internal data on delivery deaths and injuries, or even answers as to whether a hospital follows best practices, are closely guarded secrets. Making this information public would give women a way to choose safer hospitals and provide pressure for improvement.
Doctors and hospitals know exactly how to reduce the awful toll. It should not be allowed to continue. It is America’s shame.