Quality improvement in maternal and newborn healthcare is critical both in the United States and globally for various reasons. Maternal and newborn care encompasses every part of a pregnant woman’s antepartum, intrapartum, and postpartum care. The death of a mother or a newborn during pregnancy, delivery, or shortly after birth is a loss that has an adverse effect on loved ones and is a significant indicator of the quality of a health system. As a consequence, guaranteeing high medical care during pregnancy and delivery time is critical to increasing wellness and reducing avoidable deaths and health problems among mothers and their newborns. However, despite significant progress in lowering maternal and newborn mortality rates over the years, challenges remain. As a result, continuous and comprehensive efforts are required not only in the United States but also globally for a better quality of mother’s and infant’s healthcare. This paper will discuss the need for maternal and newborn health improvements.
The most common triggers for mortality in adolescent girls are challenges from being pregnant, giving birth, and pregnancy termination. A high frequency of hypertensive disorders, low birth weight, and preterm birth in adolescent pregnancies has been found in research from both wealthy and poor countries (Amoadu et al., 2022). Pregnant teenagers face stigma and neglect from loved ones, which can affect their pregnancy outcomes both directly and indirectly. Furthermore, adolescents with minimal levels of health education are more inclined to struggle with accessing medical services, comprehending medical knowledge, and correctly applying this knowledge to preserve and encourage healthy pregnancy results. Pregnant teenage girls in poor environments have adverse attitudes toward pursuing maternal health care as care is significantly divided, not well-organized, and of poor quality. Pregnant teenagers perceive basic medical services as unavailable due to judgment, a lack of respect, confidentiality and privacy concerns, bias, and moral norm imposition, especially in resource-limited settings (Amoadu et al., 2022). Cutting out adolescent pregnancy will lower the mortality rate for mothers and newborns and speed up progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals’ maternal and perinatal components.
Extreme maternal health problem threatens not only the woman’s life but also the baby may also suffer from health problem and mortality. Keeping a woman from progressing through the severity spectrum could boost the results of birth and newborn health (McClure et al., 2020). Medical conditions, for example, eclampsia, sepsis, obstructed labor, and hemorrhage, which cause maternal health problems, put newborns at risk of death. Also, if the infant lives through birth but not the mother, the baby is vulnerable to nutritional deficiencies, which can be dangerous in and of itself or could increase the possibility of health problems or mortality from infection. Furthermore, without maternal care, the other siblings can be impacted in a number of ways, including the risk of forced labor among orphans, failing grades and less academic achievement, and interrupted living arrangements, which may lead to trauma to health and well-being.
High-quality pregnancy and delivery care is critical to boosting the health of mothers and their newborns. Regardless of the fact that institutional care is available has improved in the United States and globally, it remains inadequate for a significant proportion of mothers, and many preventable deaths take place within healthcare facilities or in the hands of a professional birth attendant (Brizuela et al., 2019). The first step toward guaranteeing that all pregnant women and newborns receive high-quality care is to measure the level of quality accessible to them accurately. Many women and newborns could be saved if emergency obstetric and neonatal care became more widely available and used. In addition, apart from increased efforts to stop teenage pregnancy, it is also sensible to promote teenage use of maternal health care, as well as deal with stigma and pregnancy termination (Amoadu et al., 2022). To mitigate the risk of adolescent pregnancy, stakeholders must work to reduce socioeconomic disparities, inadequate antenatal care utilization, and alcohol consumption and enhance teenagers’ health care and academic achievement. Child marriage, abortion, inadequate healthcare infrastructure, and unsuitable healthcare facilities for adolescents must all be addressed. Also, because many pregnancy-related issues occur announced, all women should have a link to competent attendants and immediate medical attention. Changes must address associated drawbacks to access, such as time and financial costs, accessibility issues, quality of care, and psychic costs, as well as social norms that may limit maternity care utilization. Medical attention must be combined with initiatives in the community to have the greatest impact.
Addressing maternal and newborn health problems necessitates a multifaceted approach that includes increased access to quality healthcare, education, and support services, as well as efforts to combat social variables of health and minimize healthcare disparities and outcomes. Maternal health problems fail to meet broad public health objectives of enhanced women’s health but also result in inadequate delivery outcomes and poor newborn health. As a result, all countries must implement monitoring initiatives to understand the effects of serious health problems better and assess potential preventability. Moreover, keeping a woman from progressing through this severity frequency may improve birth outcomes and newborn health.
References
Amoadu, M., Hagan, D., & Ansah, E. W. (2022). Adverse obstetric and neonatal outcomes of adolescent pregnancies in Africa: A scoping review. BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth, 22(1), 1-11.
Brizuela, V., Leslie, H. H., Sharma, J., Langer, A., & Tunçalp, Ö. (2019). Measuring quality of care for all women and newborns: how do we know if we are doing it right? A review of facility assessment tools. The Lancet Global Health, 7(5), e624-e632.
McClure, E. M., Garces, A. L., Hibberd, P. L., Moore, J. L., Goudar, S. S., Saleem, S., … & Goldenberg, R. L. (2020). The Global Network Maternal Newborn Health Registry: a multi-country, community-based registry of pregnancy outcomes. Reproductive Health, 17, 1-11.
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