Maternal mortality : report of meeting held at Friends' House. Euston Road on November 15, 1932
1932-11 1932 1930s 36 pages Let us look at them for a moment. What were the conclusions of the Committee? They may be summarised as follows. I will put them, if I may, in the first place in an arithmetical manner. They found that the fatal result was primarily due in 15 per cent. of those cases (nea...
| Institution: | MCR - The Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick |
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| Language: | English English |
| Published: |
London : Maternal Mortality Committee,
November 1932
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/10796/2CB49B07-0FA3-46D2-AC2E-06FE31F05826 http://hdl.handle.net/10796/EBA65FB9-CA69-47A6-876D-2AD399845261 |
| Summary: | 1932-11
1932
1930s
36 pages
Let us look at them for a moment. What were the conclusions of the Committee? They may be summarised as follows. I will put them, if I may, in the first place in an arithmetical manner. They found that the fatal result was primarily due in 15 per cent. of those cases (nearly 6,000) which they investigated to the absence of ante-natal care, in 19 per cent. death is attributed to an error of judgment on the part of the doctor or midwife concerned, in 8 per cent. of the cases it is attributed to the negligence of the patient herself and in 4 per cent. it is attributed to a lack of facilities available at the moment of childbirth. Thus, in 46 per cent. of the cases investigated, we find that the cause of the fatal result was some cause which was avoidable, some cause that might have been prevented by human care and foresight, and, in comparison, in 54 per cent. of the cases investigated no primary avoidable factor of death could be discovered. Now that is a fact which we must realise and which we must teach others to realise, that approximately the position is this : that half of these unhappy deaths ought to have been saved and could have been saved. Ladies and gentlemen, that is the best summary that can be given, I think, of the nature of the problem before us. It is a two-fold problem. The nature of that two-fold problem is all too well known, I believe, to most of us here, and on such occasions as this we desire to spread the knowledge of it so that we may quicken the minds of those who have not yet awakened to its significance. The two-fold problem is this, is it not, first, that we are losing 3,000 mothers a year by death, at a rate a half of which is preventable, and, secondly, we know that a large number of young women are gravely invalided at childbirth. We note that in some districts this amounts to a rate of not less than 10 per cent. Now here indeed is subject matter for thought. This grave problem — glancing backwards in time — arrested the attention of the Ministry of Health when it first came into existence as a Ministry whose forces were specially to be devoted to the promotion of the health and welfare of the nation in 1919, and the attention then directed to it has borne fruit already in a series of illuminating Reports, Reports with which I may without any undue preference in personalities couple the names of two whom I see on the platform with me here to-day — Sir George Newman and Dame Janet Campbell — Reports which drew and which renew the public attention of the nation and of the Government to the existence of the problem and the means for its solution. Now in the course of inquiry the lines of advance first initiated by those efforts, I think, have found a full confirmation in this latest Report of the Departmental Committee on Maternal Mortality. (5)
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| Physical Description: | TEXT |