What you count is what you target: the implications of maternal death classification for tracking progress towards reducing maternal mortality in developing countries
Our “Article of the Week” was published in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization, by Suzanne Cross, Jacqueline S. Bell and Wendy J. Graham, who are affiliated with MHTF partner, the Initiative for Maternal Mortality Programme Assessment (IMMPACT). The authors draw on historical data from England and Wales and contemporary data from Ghana, Rwanda and South Africa to make the case for efforts to distinguish between indirect and direct causes of maternal deaths. They warn that a failure to do so can lead to inaccurate evaluations of interventions to prevent maternal deaths. Improved measurement can inform decisions to implement additional or new interventions, and is critical to measuring progress toward MDG 5.
View the article here.