Labor History Research Articles

Cleaning Up After Covid: Hotel Staffing During the Great Resignation

Ben Hom sat at his desk at McKibbon Hospitality’s Tampa corporate office. He waited for his meeting with the Regional Vice President of Operations (RVPO), who oversaw the Tampa market to discuss the 2023 budget for his 10 hotels. The RVPO feared that staffing shortages and labor costs would wreck his budgets again, as they had in 2022. Hom knew that labor costs were the second most significant variable in the budget, behind revenue, and getting anything close to accurate seemed impossible. Hom understood the RVPO’s frustration and knew similar concerns were echoing across the company. The labor force that the industry had relied upon for decades had evaporated. What worked before Covid-19 was no longer effective. Hom contemplated his options for reliable and lower-cost housekeeping staff and the best solution to this problem. Hom was Vice President of Human Resources at McKibbon Hospitality, a third-party hotel management company with 100 hotels in eight states encompassing 23 brands and 13 ownership groups (Exhibit 1). The term "Great Resignation" was coined as a systemic labor shortage resulting from resignations from current jobs or not returning to a previous position discarded because of the lower demand due to Covid-19 restrictions. Since Covid-19, hourly labor costs had escalated rapidly and varied drastically across the portfolio. There was an industry-wide labor shortage, especially for Housekeeping. Also, due to the “Great Resignation,” recruiting and retaining quality hourly associates was incredibly competitive. Hom was acutely aware of the problems and had several potential solutions to the staffing challenges. Raising starting salaries would have aided recruiting but would have reduced profit margins. Foreign workers with H2B visas could have provided needed recruits at the government-defined prevailing wage in each market, typically lower than the market wage. Staffing companies could have been used as needed but included a 30-50% premium cost. Hom also wondered if there was a way to invest in analytics and technology to disrupt the historical labor model. While solving the staffing problem was necessary for his managers, Hom also had to satisfy the goals of McKibbon’s client, the hotel owner, to deliver high-profit margins using data-driven solutions, as this was key to the company’s continued growth.

Determinants of low birth weight in the health district of Bounkiling in Senegal

Aim: Low birth weight (LBW), 9.1 million deaths per year, is a global health issue. The proportion of LBW in Senegal is estimated at 12% (in 2017) and is at 11.7% (in 2017) in the region of Sedhiou. In this regard, rigorous management is required to address this issue, especially in rural areas. The objective of the study was to identify the determinants of LBW.Methodology: This is a case-control study which has been conducted in the district of Bounkiling. Socio-demographic characteristics of the mothers, their obstetrical and medical history, and information on the health status of the newborn in the case group were compared with that of the controls. Bivariate and multivariate analyses are performed using Epi info 7 software to identify the determinants.Results: Low-weights accounted for 97.05% of LBW. The sex ratio was 0.87 in favor of girls. The Apgar score at birth was not good for 31.4% of newborns. Teenage mothers accounted for 17.08%. The multivariate analysis showed that the determinants of LBW (p < 0.05) were the female sex of the newborn, the Apgar score at birth, the maternal age <=19 years, the household income < 83.96 USD, maternal history of low birth weight and physical labor during pregnancy. Conclusion: Strengthening communication on early marriages and pregnancies, empowering women and improving pregnancy monitoring would be levers to counter the determinants of low birth weight.

FAKTOR-FAKTOR YANG MEMPENGARUHI KEJADIAN PERSALINAN PREMATUR DI RSIA STELLA MARIS MEDAN TAHUN 2022

Background: Preterm/preterm delivery is still a problem in the world including Indonesia, related to prevalence, morbidity and perinatal mortality which is the main cause of infant death and the second cause of death after pneumonia in children under five years of age. This study aims to determine the factors that influence the incidence of preterm labor at Rsia Stella Maris Medan in 2022. Method: This type of research is a descriptive study, with a cross-sectional design. Sampling was carried out systematically (systematic random sampling), where the sample in this study was 64 respondents. Data collection techniques using a questionnaire sheet. The bivariate analysis technique uses the che square test. Results: the results are almost half of the birth events with ages <20->35 years as many as 40 respondents (59.4%) almost half of the birth events with parity ≥5 times as many as 38 respondents (32.9%), most of the birth events with Ever experienced premature labor as many as 35 respondents (54.7%), almost half of those with premature rupture of membranes were 34 (53.1%), most of the incidents of childbirth with placenta previa were pregnant women not with placenta previa as many as 44 respondents (68.8%), most of the incidents of childbirth with pregnant women who experienced preeclampsia/eclampsia were (56.2%) and most of the deliveries were with twin pregnancies for pregnant women with single pregnancies as many as 36 respondents (56.2%). Conclusion: That there is a relationship between age, parity, history of preterm labor, PROM, Placenta Previa, Preeclampsia/Eclampsia, Twin Pregnancies Affecting Premature Labor at Rsia Stella Maris Medan in 2022

Hydrocarbons and human resources: histories of labor, social relations, and industrial culture in the oil and gas industry

Le travail humain et les savoirs ont été des atouts essentiels pour les entreprises et les États dans le domaine de l’extraction et de la production d’énergie. Les ouvriers, les ingénieurs, les technocrates et les managers ont en effet joué un rôle central dans le développement de l’industrie des hydrocarbures. Éclipsés par les images des appareils de forage, des pipelines et des raffineries qui dominent le pétro-imaginaire contemporain, les hommes et les femmes ayant contribué à la création de cette industrie sont souvent réduits à des rôles secondaires et présentés, par l’industrie elle-même, comme des personnages stéréotypés. En suivant la récente tournure historiographique proposée par l’émergence des concepts de “oil complex” et “oil assemblage”, plusieurs chercheurs ont questionné les structures matérielles et les organisations techniques de l’industrie du pétrole et du gaz, en adoptant des approches d’histoire sociale et d’histoire du travail. Ce numéro spécial de la Revue d’Histoire de l’énergie présente les derniers travaux des chercheurs qui ont décidé de replacer l’élément humain au cœur de l’analyse de l’histoire des hydrocarbures aux XIXème et au XXème siècles. En puisant dans les archives des entreprises et des organisations et en adoptant une approche d’histoire sociale et culturelle, ils essayent de reconstituer les expériences de vie et de travail des hommes et des femmes dans l’industrie des hydrocarbures. Leurs recherches se focalisent sur des époques et des zones géographiques très différentes, ce qui permet à ce numéro spécial de présenter une grande diversité d’organisations, individus et groupes sociaux en proposant une analyse critique du rôle joué par ceux-ci dans l’extraction, la production, la distribution et la consommation d’énergie carbone. En somme, ce numéro montre comment les structures matérielles et les formes organisationnelles qui ont construit l’industrie du pétrole et du gaz ont façonné et ont été façonnées par les processus de construction identitaire et de professionnalisation, par l’émergence des inégalités et par les mobilisations sociales, par la circulation de l’expertise économique et technique ainsi que par les interactions socio-environnementales.

Hungry for Revolution: The Politics of Food and the Making of Modern Chile

Hungry for Revolution: The Politics of Food and the Making of Modern Chile

Labor in State-Socialist Europe, 1945–1989: Contributions to a History of Work

Labor in State-Socialist Europe, 1945–1989: Contributions to a History of Work

Salinas: A History of Race and Resilience in an Agricultural City by Carol Lynn McKibben

In this community history of Salinas, an agricultural powerhouse in Central California, McKibben outlines the city’s changing ethnic and racial composition since it emerged in the 1860s, eventually to be incorporated as the seat of Monterey County in 1874. The author focuses primarily on Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and Mexican immigrants, as well as on Dust Bowl migrants, to explore the complicated and nuanced ways by which the lettuce capital of California took shape as a “multiracial, gendered community with a shared belief in American ideals of democracy and equality, even when that belief system proved naïve or misplaced” (5). In that passage lies the crux of McKibben’s argument: Although the city’s residents recognized that all groups were necessary to the endeavor of city-building, not until recent decades did whites begin to acknowledge the contributions of minority groups to any extent. Race relations in Salinas involved “complex mixtures of inclusiveness and marginalization” that nonetheless tended to support “a system of white supremacy” (126). Change in the form of meaningful access to political power finally arrived late in the twentieth century when Salinas became a minority-majority city that is now overwhelmingly Latino/a.McKibben tells this story in nine chronological chapters, consulting a wide range of local sources—records from the Monterey County Historical Society and the chamber of commerce, city-council minutes dating back well into the nineteenth century, the minutes of the Grower-Shipper Association (gsa) that provide insights into labor relations during the Great Depression, local newspapers, and interviews in the collections of the John Steinbeck Library. In addition, the author conducted numerous oral interviews across a wide range of the city’s population. Although this book is largely a local history, it ripples outward to include the economy and demographics of the greater central-California region, statewide immigration (and migration) developments, and evolving federal immigration policy from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 though the reforms of the 1950s and 1960s. With this layered approach, Salinas contributes to our understanding of cities embedded in rural regions with agricultural economies, and of city-building processes in the context of race relations during periods of rapid demographic change. The book is informed by a number of fields in addition to urban history, including ethnic studies, Chicano/a history, agricultural and labor history, and the history of California and the West.McKibben argues that migrants of all ethnic and racial backgrounds who came to Salinas and the Salinas Valley viewed farming (even tenant farming) as a way to enter the middle class. Her contention that socioeconomic mobility was available for Asians (or at least their American-born children who could own property in California), as well as whites challenges the prediction of McWilliams and Steinbeck that industrialized agricultural production in 1930s California would result in a permanent caste system.1 This path to middle-class life, however, was still limited by white hegemony. It was only “possible for enough members of excluded groups to move into property ownership … to make it appear that there was opportunity for all” (95).Spatial boundaries based on race and class exist in Salinas as elsewhere in the state and nation. The unincorporated adjacent community of Alisal, located east of downtown, housed much of Salinas’ poor and working-class families both before and after Salinas annexed it in 1963, becoming increasingly Latino/a. The Latino/a community, as well as the female population, in Salinas and Alisal were long underserved in terms of infrastructure, housing, education, and political representation. By the closing decades of the twentieth century, however, individual and collective activism had managed to secure gains for them in city government and planning, but, according to McKibben, this new sense of belonging was just sufficient to forestall further challenges to white privilege.

The Road to Blair Mountain: Saving a Mine Wars Battlefield from King Coal

The Road to Blair Mountain: Saving a Mine Wars Battlefield from King Coal

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction

Love's Next Meeting: The Forgotten History of Homosexuality and the Left in American Culture

I am thrilled to be reviewing a work of queer history in this journal. Too often the queer and labor movements seem separate, and this division is blamed on their historical emergence. Aaron Lecklider asserts otherwise. Love's Next Meeting turns to the archive and to literature to explore how sex, class, perversion, labor organizing, and antiracism interpenetrate.I'll focus here on the first half of the book, which has the most to say about workers. While acknowledging “the failures of the left to build a cultural movement centralizing sexual dissidence as a political concern,” Lecklider also locates and analyzes how queer people, queer desires, and queer concerns shaped leftist thought and activism (6). He implies that the failure to center sexual dissidence had the effect not of prohibiting queer engagement but, rather, of nurturing it, since queerness operates better as a campy style of critique than as a “political concern.”Chapter 4 focuses specifically on labor in part via the example, made famous by Alan Bérubé, of the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union. As more gay men were drawn to this work, they felt increasingly comfortable being identifiable and using the union to fight for their rights as gay workers. Lecklider points out that the union also challenged the homo/hetero binary by virtue of its class and labor alliances (122). Because the union embraced dissidence and militancy, it resisted the pull of middle-class assimilation. At least for a while.When workers seek to advance class ranks (to enter the middle class, usually) either by joining or by resisting a union, they do so by adopting middle-class sexual styles. Ultimately, these middle-class sexual styles—restraint, monogamy, separation between domestic and work spheres—come to define what gets read as gay, lesbian, queer.Lecklider devotes an entire chapter to the workplace. Often sexuality is understood as separate from work, and even from class, and this book brings them back together by examining archival and literary contexts in which “sex and labor were intertwined” (143). He finds numerous instances in which the radical nature of labor activism both feeds and draws from sexual deviance.As people without class privilege who occupied stigmatized (often racialized or feminized) jobs and risked association with the despised Communist Party, workers could forge queer and interracial alliances, since they essentially had nothing left to lose. During the 1940s, the Marine Cooks and Stewards went beyond enabling this radicalism to embracing it. “The tendency of members to associate with the dispossessed, rather than aspiring to respectability, suggests how tightly deviant politics was stitched into the fabric of the union culture” (121).This embrace of deviance as an organizing strategy has the potential to radicalize union efforts today, and this book's valuable lesson is that it's not new—it has a very long history. Labor historians Michael Goldfield and Toni Gilpin have documented this past practice, and Lecklider adds the crucial perspective of queer history. If “labor is a highly sexed enterprise” and if “leftists imagined labor as a site of queer possibility,” then Starbucks baristas, Amazon warehouse pickers, and the adjunct faculty and janitors in my own local are adding a new chapter to an existing practice (143, 145). Solidarity appeals to workers whose conditions of labor isolate and stigmatize them, and the workplace brings all kinds of people together and provides them with a common experience, which can mute bigotry and foster community.So, history doesn't corroborate a division between queer and worker politics and activism, yet Lecklider acknowledges that recently they have swum in separate streams. Anti-fascism and the Cold War elevated consumerism and domesticity. When the left erased its earlier overlap with homosexuality, it “was not an unintended consequence of building a gay rights movement. It was a strategy born out of a commitment to rejecting a broader revolutionary struggle” (295). Separately, each could embrace capitalism, linked to middle-class sexual and social norms and to the myth of American exceptionalism. Love's Next Meeting offers an alternative history—labor's historic embrace of deviance—which serves as warning, as model, and as pure campy fun.

The Fierce Life of Grace Holmes Carlson: Catholic, Socialist, Feminist

The Fierce Life of Grace Holmes Carlson: Catholic, Socialist, Feminist

Working-Class Germans in the Salt City: Syracuse, New York, 1860–1916

Working-Class Germans in the Salt CitySyracuse, New York, 1860–1916 Daniel Koch (bio) The central city of the Empire State was once the home of thousands of Germans, the largest contingent in a multicultural, multilingual urban melting pot. Syracuse was one of the key industrial cities of the United States during the Civil War era and into the twentieth century. Like other American cities, its industrial might was built on immigrant labor, much of which was German. Yet, there has not been a historical study of German Syracuse since the editors of the German-language Syracuse Union newspaper produced a book called Geschichte der Deutschen in Syracuse und Onondaga County (The history of the Germans in Syracuse and Onondaga County) in 1897. Like the tomes of county history produced around the same time, the Geschichte focuses on the great and the good. Its subtitle gives its intention away—Nebst Kurzen Biographien von Beamten and Hervorragenden Buergern (With short biographies of officials and prominent citizens). The book is handsomely illustrated with portraits of eminent German Americans who achieved great success in their careers, and who also gave back to their communities by supporting churches, schools, and charities. These leaders were a source of pride at a time when "great man" status was the aim to which young men were taught to aspire. But the men (and they are all men) whose portraits adorn the Geschichte were exceptions. Most German immigrants worked in industrial jobs, living in what urban accommodation they could afford. They clustered in immigrant neighborhoods with other Germans but also often in mixed communities with other groups of immigrants—Irish, particularly in the early decades, and Italian and Polish in the later part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This article seeks to expose a little-studied German community, going beyond the limited great-man focused nineteenth-century sources that exist. Both the Geschichte and Dwight H. Bruce's Memorial History of Syracuse (1891), the two most detailed views of the city in the late nineteenth century, portray a highly positive view of a flourishing German [End Page 361] American community that exemplified civic virtue.1 Historians have maintained that Germans were widely accepted, even celebrated, in American society between the Civil War and the outbreak of World War I.2 The purpose here is not to try to undermine this view; indeed, the records from Syracuse in this period clearly bear it out. Nor is it to write a labor history of Germans in Syracuse. It is rather to bring back to life some of what was left out or swept under the carpet in building this narrative of German success in America. This article seeks to answer why these omissions occurred and argues that it was at least partially related to pervasive racialist discourse in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Furthermore, studying Syracuse's German community enables us to reconstruct the urban geography of a nineteenth-century industrial center and take a new look at a lost German neighborhood in a key American city. Syracuse was a relatively late city to emerge in New York State. The land upon which it is built was part of the Onondaga Reservation, a 64,000-acre tract that was exempt from white settlement by the terms of the 1788 treaty between the State of New York and the Onondaga Nation.3 Syracuse is still known as the salt city due to the briny waters that flow into Onondaga Lake, from which salt can be made using a boiling process. Water from Syracuse's salt springs, an 1834 map boasted, produced nearly seven times as much salt as the same quantity of sea water. "Solar salt" was also produced by allowing the water to evaporate in the sun and raking in the remaining salt. Subsequent exploitative treaties with the state chipped away at the Onondaga Reservation (other Haudenosaunee people in New York experienced the same in the so-called treaty period between the 1790s and 1820s). The land upon which Syracuse was built was transferred first to the state and then sold off to private buyers. Settlers poured in, mainly from New England, in the early decades...

Convicts: A Global History by Clare Anderson

Visitors to the Breton city of Brest can take the téléphérique from the edge of the city center across the Penfeld River to an arts complex housed in the old arsenal buildings high on the opposite bank. This cable car offers an unparalleled view of what was a huge penal-military-industrial complex, a set of docks and quays for the French navy, built largely by the labor of convicts incarcerated in the city’s riverside bagne—one of France’s largest prisons—and its galleys. When the prison was shut in 1858 for being too soft on its inmates, convicts were shipped across the oceans, under a law passed in 1854, to penal colonies in French Guiana and, after 1864, New Caledonia, where they cleared land, farmed, and built more infrastructure for the French empire. As Anderson’s new book demonstrates, the sorts of connections between empire, penal regimes, and labor revealed by convicts’ mobile lives give a different cast to both the history of punishment and global histories of imperial power and knowledge.Convicts is a history of “penal mobility” in two ways (7). First, it offers a comparative account of punishment practices across five centuries in not only all of the Western European empires, but also the newly-independent Latin American states, Russia, China, and Japan. This establishes the geographies (including some very useful maps) and demographics of the movement of convicts in each case, and then uses the similarities and differences between these examples to examine changing practices. This remarkable breadth of vision is achieved through original archival research, primarily on the British and French examples, and by drawing on and synthesizing the fruits of Anderson’s extensive and long-standing collaborative work on different convict labor systems within the European Union–funded “Carceral Archipelago” project (2013–2018).Second, this book contributes to our understanding of global history because penal mobility itself was global. European empires moved convicts (including rebels and political exiles, as well as those convicted of criminal activity) across the world from metropole to colony, from colony to colony (often in surprising ways), and sometimes from colony to metropole. For nation-states, such as Japan, Argentina, or Brazil, that used convict labor within, or more usually at, their borders, convict mobility was shaped by a globally networked discussion on the practice convened in print, government reports, and through penal tours and International Penitentiary Congresses held from 1872 onwards.Anderson’s aim and achievement in writing this volume is significantly to rewrite histories of punishment that have focused on incarceration, immobility, and the prison and, at the same time, to insert convicts into global labor history and the history of migration, from which they have been missing. Each of these are interdisciplinary concerns, and Anderson’s approach is shaped by and contributes to two key cross-disciplinary frameworks that have oriented studies of global history for at least the last thirty years—empire and knowledge. Part I of the book examines in detail how empires and states used convict labor (often alongside or instead of other forms of coerced labor) to secure territories and borderlands, to clear forests and transform other environments, to settle and farm, and to build crucial infrastructure. Part II shows how knowledge of the convict system itself was generated and circulated, but also that convicts were part of the production and circulation of global forms of knowledge about bodies, nature, and society, particularly in the nineteenth century.Convicts were involved in exploration and natural history at the margins of empire, but also in studies that used new techniques of bodily measurement and social science to test theories of medicine, criminality and race, and of changing social structures. While these are histories of power and control, Anderson is constantly alert to the ways in which convicts resisted, subverted, and moved against authority in order to make their own lives where they could and to produce, reproduce, and circulate radical and subversive political ideas.Overall, Convicts: A Global History is a remarkable achievement, a work of global history based on many years of research that restores a subaltern group to its place in the world through both a panoramic overview and the tracing of individual lives lived in extremis.

On a Contribution to Never-Ending Journey of Labour History

Silinecek

VAGINAL PROGESTERONE IN RISK REDUCTION OF PRETERM BIRTH IN WOMEN WITH SHORT CERVIX IN MID TRIMESTER OF PREGNANCY

Background: Preterm labour is a major health challenge in obstetrics. Many risk factors being identified, the most common one is short cervical length, can be diagnosed by transvaginal ultrasound scan after 13 weeks of pregnancy. Vaginal progesterone is the most bioavailable form of progesterone that have effect on uterine and cervix. Progesterone is found to inhibit the production of proinflammatory cytokines and prostaglandins within the uterus and to inhibit myometrial contractility Aim:To evaluate the efficacy of vaginal progesterone administration for preventing preterm birth and decrease perinatal morbidity and mortality in asymptomatic women with a singleton gestation and a mid-trimester sonographic cervical length (CL) ≤ 25 mm. Materials And Methods:This is a prospective study of asymptomatic women with a singleton pregnancy and a sonographic short cervix (<25mm) at 19 + 0 to 23 + 6 weeks of gestation. Women were allocated randomly to receive vaginal progesterone or placebo daily starting from 19 + 0 to 23 + 6 weeks until 36 + 6 weeks, rupture of membranes or delivery, whichever occurred first. Randomization sequence was stratified by centre and history of a previous preterm birth. The primary endpoint was preterm birth before 33 weeks of gestation. Analysis was by intention to treat. Results:Out of 100 patients for whom study was done, 20 lost to followup and remaining divided into two groups: 40 Singleton pregnant women with CL<25mm between 19 + 0 to 23 + 6 weeks of gestation with no sign and symptoms were given daily vaginal progesterone for up to 36 + 6 weeks, rupture of membranes or delivery, whichever occurred first. The dose is 200 mg once daily and a group of 40 women with cervical length of <25 mm between 19 + 0 to 23 + 6 weeks of pregnancy were given no treatment, Maximum distribution belongs to age of 19-24 years followed by 30-34 years. Most of women in this study have no history of preterm labour. In those who received vaginal progesterone 5 women had history of previous preterm labour and five women in no treatment group. It was found that there was statistically significant reduction in preterm labour in women with short cervix <2.5cm with 200mg vaginal progesterone. Conclusions:This updated systematic review and meta-analysis reaffirms that vaginal progesterone reduces the risk of preterm birth and neonatal morbidity and mortality in women with a singleton gestation and a mid-trimester CL ≤ 25 mm, without any deleterious effects on neurodevelopmental outcome. Clinicians should continue to perform universal transvaginal CL screening at 19 + 0 to 23 + 6 weeks of gestation in women with a singleton gestation and to offer vaginal progesterone to those with a CL ≤ 25 mm.

Missionaries, the State, and Labour in Colonial Kenya c.1909–c.1919: the ‘Gospel of Work’ and the ‘Able-Bodied Male Native’

Abstract This article is a study of the role of the Church of Scotland Mission within the labour system in colonial Kenya at the start of the twentieth century. With their ‘Gospel of Work’, their government-funded technical apprenticeship scheme, and a series of legal-political interventions to regulate the settler economy, the Mission played a crucial role in the augmentation of the colonial state and capitalism in Kenya’s highlands. Examining how this ostensibly ‘benign’ Christian project became entangled within colonial networks incarceration, coercion, and abuse, this article offers a fresh perspective onto established histories of labour, violence, and colonial rule in Kenya.

An Empirical Synthesis of Human Labor History

An Empirical Synthesis of Human Labor History

Extracting the frequent sequential patterns among the factors associated with neonatal birthweight

The objective of this study was to employ the association rules mining technique to find the frequent co-occurrences among maternal factors associated with birthweight. Secondary data consisting of 189 records with predictors that assess the risk factors that influence low neonatal birthweight were employed for association rules mining. The extracted rules show that the different patterns of co-occurrences among these factors: a mother's pre-pregnancy weight, presence/absence of uterine irritability, attendance to antenatal care visits in the first trimester, hypertension history, maternal age, and a history of premature labor often lead to either a low or normal neonatal birthweight. The extracted rules could serve as a reference tool in the education, treatment, and care of pregnant women to ensure positive outcomes related to birthweight. Flowing from these rules, pregnant mothers should be educated about the relationship between their attributes and the probable birthweight of their unborn babies.

Annual General Meeting of the Canadian Committee on Labour History, 8 June 2022, Convened virtually from various locations across Turtle Island

Annual General Meeting of the Canadian Committee on Labour History, 8 June 2022, Convened virtually from various locations across Turtle Island

Characteristics and Surgical Repair Outcomes of Obstetric Fistula Patients Managed at a Teaching Hospital in Zambia: A Retrospective Cross Sectional Study

Background
 The obstetric fistula is a chronic maternal morbidity of global public health concern. The condition is preventable and in most cases treatable. Surgical repair is the mainstay of treatment with varying degrees of success. The aim of this study was to determine the characteristics, surgical outcomes and factors influencing surgical outcomes of women presenting with obstetric fistulas at a Teaching Hospital in Lusaka, Zambia.
 Methods 
 A retrospective review of medical records for all women who underwent obstetric fistula repair surgery at Women and Newborn Hospital from 2017 to 2019. Descriptive analysis was done. Fischer’s exact test was used to measure association between surgical outcomes and variables in the model.
 Results
 In total, 18 out of 29 records of patients who underwent fistula repair were retrieved and analyzed. Ages ranged from 15 to 47 years, mean age 29years. Over two thirds (72.23%) were multiparous, and over 3/4ths (77.8%) underwent caesarean section in the antecedent pregnancy. Success rate for fistula repair was 83% at 2 weeks post-operative. Study findings were inadequate to show a significant association between successful repair and factors in the model.
 Conclusion 
 Majority of women presenting with obstetric fistula were multiparous with a history of prolonged labour, delivery by cesarean section and poor birth outcomes. The success rate for obstetric fistula repair at Women and Newborn Hospital was 83% at 2weeks postoperative. Further studies are needed to assess long-term outcomes and factors influencing surgical outcomes.