The full series is here, but I want to focus on one article: Hospitals know how to protect mothers. They just aren’t doing it.
The rest of the world is getting it right, while our private medical care system is getting it wrong:
Countries around the world have reduced maternal deaths and injuries by aggressively monitoring care and learning from mistakes. The result has been two decades of steady or reduced maternal harms in the rest of the developed world – as U.S. rates climbed.
Over and over again, hospitals prefer to blame dead mothers instead of trying to prevent future maternal deaths.
women giving birth in Great Britain die from childbirth complications at one-third of the rate they do here.
Hospitals should be following a series of recommendations
a coalition of the nation’s leading medical societies created the AIM Program. The program formalized safety practices that have been shown to reduce maternal injuries into a series of “safety bundles” that detail treatment policies, safety equipment, training programs and internal reviews every maternity hospital should have.
The result is mothers at risk
Among about 40 maternity hospitals in New York state, less than half of mothers experiencing dangerously high blood pressure got proper treatment, the records show.
In Pennsylvania, the data for about a dozen hospitals show mothers being promptly treated only 49 to 67 percent of the time.
More than 65 percent of mothers didn’t get proper treatment at Bon Secours St. Francis Hospital in Charleston, South Carolina.
The result is death. Let’s change this, starting in blue states, where we care about life.