A report on maternal mortality 2078

Abstract

The Sustainable Development Goals include the target of reducing the global maternal mortality ratio (MMR) to less than 70 per 100,000 live births, with no country having an MMR that exceeds twice the global average. Nepal has committed to reduce the MMR from 281 per 100,000 live births in 2006 to 116 by 2022, 99 by 2025, and 70 by 2030. This Nepal Maternal Mortality Study 2021 is the first ever joint undertaking of the Ministry of Health and Population (MoHP), the National Statistics Office (NSO), the Nepal Health Research Council, and health development partners for estimating the MMR and identifying the causes of maternal deaths – during pregnancy, delivery, and postpartum periods – in Nepal. By doing so, it intends to inform evidence-based policies and programs at the federal, provincial, and local levels. The MoHP, in collaboration with the NSO, made an arrangement through a Memorandum of Understanding, where the census enumerators, as a part of their regular work, collected data on live births and deaths of women of reproductive age (WRA) in the enumerated households for the last 12 months preceding the National Population and Housing Census 2021. In the first phase, those Census enumerators then completed the death notification forms to identify pregnancy-related deaths, and submitted them to the census supervisor and notified the deaths to the pre-identified and trained local level health workers. In the second phase of the study, the local level health workers visited the household of each of the deceased women, verified the information and identified the pregnancy related deaths. For each pregnancy-related death identified, a verbal autopsy was conducted by trained health workers using the verbal autopsy form.