Infant, maternal mortality rates to be reviewed

Meeting being held in the backdrop of pre-term baby deaths at Dharmapuri PHCs, GH

The Tamil Nadu Health Department will review the State’s infant mortality rate (IMR) and maternal mortality rate (MMR) at a meeting to be held in Chennai on Wednesday. The Joint Directors of Medical and Rural Services of all districts have been instructed to collect the relevant data of their respective districts immediately.

Health Minister C. Vijaya Basker, Health Secretary J. Radhakrishnan and Director of Medical Education S. Geethalakshmi besides top officials of the Department are expected to review the performances of various health indicators.

Official sources told The Hindu here on Monday that the meeting was being accorded high priority and was being held to take stock of child delivery apparatus in the State in the wake of a spate of recent pre-term baby deaths at the Government Hospital and Primary Health Centres at Dharmapuri.

A total of 20 items including the development works at Government hospitals are expected to be reviewed.

Focus

The focus will be on the performance of the neo-natal intensive care units (NICU), labour and gynaecology wards of Government hospitals, and the comprehensive emergency obstetric and newborn care (CEmONC) centres. The NICU of CMCH has among the highest referral rates among Government hospitals in the State.

The Joint Directors have begun gathering data from the tertiary care centres in their respective districts, which would be Coimbatore Medical College Hospital for Coimbatore district, besides from the district administration.

Sources said that the mortality rates had declined in CMCH, which saw a lot of ‘high risk’ cases. Many pregnant women, who were initially admitted in private hospitals, were referred to the CMCH if the case became complicated.

A senior CMCH doctor said that the health of a pregnant woman was the main reason that posed a risk to the baby. Even though the Government was distributing iron tablet supplements free of cost through various social welfare schemes, the compliance rate was poor among pregnant women.

Further, the Tamil Nadu Government, through the ‘Weekly Iron and Folic Acid Supplementary Programme,’ was distributing iron and folic acid tablets in government schools to reduce anaemia among adolescent boys and girls. This was not confined only to the rural areas but urban areas as well.