Emergency and Critical Care Challenges during Pregnancy

Abstract

Maternal mortality continues to be a challenging issue throughout the world. The causes of higher maternal mortality vary slightly among various developing and developed nations across the globe. From the published data, pulmonary embolism leads the list of fatal aetiology in developed nations like US whereas the data from developing nations though lacking but reveals haemorrhage and hypertensive disorders as the main aetiologic factors [1,2]. In developed countries like United States, only 0.2-0.9% of obstetric patients gets admitted in critical care units. The availability of well equipped modern labour rooms, excellent delivery services and specialized obstetric units are responsible for such a smaller number of obstetric admissions to intensive care units. The approximate data depicts that only about 40,000-1,20,000 women in US require critical care services in proportion to 4.3 million births per year [3-5]. The exact similar data for developing nations is very difficult to obtain but it reflects a very dismal picture as the maternal mortality rates are quite high in most of the Asian and African countries.