Abstract
Making caesarean section safer for African mothers
Highlights
In many African countries, women giving birth still face substantial risks to their own life and that of their baby. In this issue of The Lancet Global Health, David Bishop and colleagues[1] report on maternal and neonatal outcomes after caesarean section in 22 African countries. Their findings suggest that this risk remains true even for women who have access to caesarean delivery in a hospital facility, the highest level of intervention afforded under emergency obstetric care
Over three-quarters of women having caesarean delivery presented emergently, with a high baseline preoperative risk owing to pregnancy-related complications, including pre-eclampsia or eclampsia, placenta praevia, placental abruption, uterine rupture, and antepartum haemorrhage
Pooling deaths across health facilities and countries to achieve stable continental-wide estimates and to identify explanatory variables comes at the expense of the contextual granularity required to understand the root causes of each maternal death within a given facility and country. Both approaches are needed to document the magnitude of the problem and to identify which deaths and complications after caesarean section occur as a result of poor-quality care or failure to rescue and are attributable to processes occurring within the health facility, and which represent shortcomings in the broader health system
Summary
In many African countries, women giving birth still face substantial risks to their own life and that of their baby. In this issue of The Lancet Global Health, David Bishop and colleagues[1] report on maternal and neonatal outcomes after caesarean section in 22 African countries.
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