Healthcare sector frustrated by child and maternal mortality rates

Healthcare professionals have expressed frustration over New Zealand’s persistent infant and maternal mortality rates.

On Tuesday, Te Tāhū Hauora Health Service Quality and Safety Commission released the annual report of the Perinatal and Maternal Mortality Review Committee (PMMRC), which covers the years 2006-2021.

The report reveals almost 10,000 deaths and hundreds of babies diagnosed with moderate to severe neonatal encephalopathy (brain dysfunction).

PMMRC Chairman John Tait said Morning report Unresolved inequalities have meant that maternal mortality rates in Aotearoa New Zealand have remained stable for the past 15 years.

This, he added, is a reason for ongoing frustration and exhaustion across the sector.

The PMMRC series of reports has produced a large body of evidence revealing significant inequalities in perinatal clinical outcomes related to demographic and socioeconomic factors, including ethnicity and poverty.

“The main problem we have is inequality and if we could somehow solve that problem, we could solve the problem of perinatal loss,” Tait said.

“If you look at Māori, Pacific, Indian, women under 20 and those living in extreme poverty, they all have significantly higher perinatal losses than other population groups. And that’s an area that really needs to be looked at.”

Tait said this was the fifth review he had been involved in and he wondered why stakeholders had not implemented changes to previous recommendations within a year.

“We need some significant changes from stakeholders,” he said.

“We present it (the report) every year and every year we say these numbers are terrifying, and then nothing concrete happens.”

He called on the Government and the Ministry of Health to consider solutions and systemic changes that could be introduced in response to the review’s findings.

In his opinion, better access to ultrasound scans, better access to services, different ways of making services available to the community and eliminating co-payments for ultrasound scans could be helpful.

He said suicide is the leading cause of maternal death and believes it is a “resource problem.”

He added that accessing mental health support is “extremely difficult” for young mothers.

He believed there were only eight to 10 beds in the country for mothers with serious mental health problems, and that there was a need for about 30 such beds across the country.

The report also showed a small, statistically significant upward trend in the incidence of neonatal encephalopathy.

People of European New Zealand descent were 67 per cent less likely to commit suicide than Māori women.

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