Something to Talk About

There was a new conversation that swirled throughout the Women Deliver conference in Kuala Lumpur last week.

We touched on it with our blogs from the conference and it has now made its’ way to the Gates Foundation Impatient Optimists blog and the Family Care International blog.

The topic is the interconnectedness of maternal and newborn health. Medical professionals, researchers and NGOs used to focus on one or the other, either maternal health or newborn health, but new research conducted by Aga Khan University in Pakistan, working in collaboration with Family Care International and with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, found that the two are so inextricably linked that medical and social interventions you do to benefit one, also benefits the health of the other. Researchers looked at more than 150 interventions, assessing them for impact on both maternal and neonatal outcomes and the results were clear — maternal health and newborn health can’t be separated and the same interventions we do for one, benefits the other.

For most parents and many healthcare professionals, this is not new information, and in fact, seems kind of obvious. For the communities invested in improving maternal and newborn health outcomes, this new perspective on integrated maternal-newborn healthcare is exciting, challenging and will hopefully mean that more mothers and their babies will be saved during the critical first days after birth. Read our blog about the First Lady of Zambia, an obstetrician whose own premature delivery due to preeclampsia lead to her understanding and commitment to save newborns’ lives.