Report on confidential enquiries into maternal deaths in England and Wales, 1964-1966 / by Humphrey Arthure [and others].

Date:
1969
Catalogue details

Licence: Open Government Licence

Credit: Report on confidential enquiries into maternal deaths in England and Wales, 1964-1966 / by Humphrey Arthure [and others]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    births during the same period. This may reflect a greater use of anaesthesia dur- ing pregnancy and childbirth and figures are not available to discover if this is the sole cause. Whatever the reason the findings of this enquiry suggest that a skilled anaesthetist must be immediately available whenever and wherever abnormal obstetric work is undertaken. Figure 4 in chapter 1 of this report illustrates the increasing proportion of births occurring in hospital, and it may be that this steady increase is one of several factors which have tended to reduce the number of deaths due to or associated with pregnancy and childbirth. The figures in Tables XXXVHII and XXXIX show a rate of 0-183 deaths amongst women booked for home con- finement per 1,000 births at home where only normal confinements are or should be undertaken. Tables XLII and XLIII give deaths among women booked for delivery in hospital where the chance of complication ending in death is con- siderably weighted by the deliberate selection of medically and obstetrically abnormal women and those living in adverse social circumstances. An age-parity analysis was made of all women who died whose age and parity was reported in the 1964-66 series and is shown in Table 8 of Appendix I. It will be seen that death increased with age independent of parity and the safest age for the mother having a first baby was between 20 and 25 years whereas the primigravida of 40 years or more was at greatest danger. At any age the maternal death rate was considerably increased amongst women who were having their fifth or more child, and this was also true of women over the age of 40 years regardless of parity. The reduction in maternal mortality since the previous three-year period is therefore partially due to the fact that during the years 1964-66 fewer babies were born to women over the age of 29 (see Appendix I, Table 4) and fewer women had five or more children (see Appendix I, Table 6). 11]