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Welcome to my Blog. I hope you find the posts interesting, informative and perhaps even entertaining(!). I'll update this Blog with my responses to topical stories of the day, important news and tales of my travels up and down the UK, meeting our inspirational nursing staff.

The RCN represents almost 400,000 nurses in the UK and is the country's largest nursing union.

Thursday 3 September 2009

Maternal Mortality

One of the best things about working for an organisation like the RCN is that you get to meet some brilliant people undertaking some very important work.

Yesterday I visited 10 Downing Street to meet with Sarah Brown and other members of the Maternal Mortality campaign team.

Maternal Mortality is a campaign that the RCN has been proud to support and the meeting was very productive and informative. It’s only when you look at the facts surrounding maternal mortality that one realises just what an important topic it is.

Every minute of every day, a woman dies of pregnancy related complications, totalling more than half a million women each year. By the time you’ve read this blog, somewhere in the world a child has been born who will never know their mother.

When I say ‘somewhere in the world’, there’s a 99% chance that the mother will die in a developing country. In sub-Saharan Africa, a mother has a 1 in 8 chance of dying in childbirth; in Western Europe that figure is just 1 in 8000.

Almost half of all women in developing countries deliver their babies without a nurse, midwife or doctor present.

The simple truth is that these figures are an international scandal and we need real action now.

The Maternal Mortality campaign have set themselves a number of key objectives in order to ensure that this problem gets the recognition it deserves. To find out all about the campaign and what it’s calling for, visit the website - www.whiteribbonalliance.org

Please, get involved and support this incredibly important cause.

2 comments:

  1. thanks for this it is a very worthwhile cause and very close to my heart.

    Claire

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  2. I suppose you're going to ignore the comments attached to your previous post then are you? This isn't people deliberately trying to cause trouble, or making nuisance posts Dr Carter. These comments are posted by people that suffered at the hands of nurses and other 'professionals' in this NHS, which resulted directly in death for the relatives. Are you going to answer then? Or just keep posting happy happy posts written through your rose tinted spectacles.

    ReplyDelete