Preventability of perinatal losses by the example of the large industrial cities Chelyabinsk and Novosibirsk

Abstract

to audit perinatal losses in large regional centers of the Russian Federation with a population of over 1 million inhabitants, such as Chelyabinsk and Novosibirsk. A comprehensive postmortem examination of 309 cases of perinatal losses in 2016 was made, which was supplemented with an assessment of preventability according to the Scandinavian-Baltic classification. The rate of preventable deaths in Chelyabinsk and Novosibirsk amounted to 91 and 81.5% of cases, respectively; the deaths were due to stillbirths at more than 28 weeks' gestation and to dead newborns in almost half of cases. The proportion of intranatal deaths was shown to increase in Chelyabinsk; the number of neonatal deaths at more than 33 weeks' gestation rose in Novosibirsk. Supplementing the traditional clinical and postmortem analysis with an assessment of the preventability of perinatal loss makes it possible to ensure a unified approach to evaluating these conditions and the comparability of autopsy results in different subjects of the Russian Federation and to determine regional reserves for reducing perinatal mortality rates.