Maternity hospitals across the country aren’t doing enough to prevent deadly deliveries.
The nation’s largest hospital accreditation group just proposed new regulations that would protect mothers in about 2,700 birthing hospitals across the country.
The proposal would require those hospitals to take specific actions related to severe bleeding and dangerously high blood pressure.
These measures have been recommended for years — and they have repeatedly been ignored.
Among developed nations, the US is the most dangerous place to give birth. Finally, this would be a measure that would help end that.
Hospitals that failed to meet these requirements could lose their Joint Commission Accreditation.
There is a lack of national requirements for maternity wards to follow established safety practices and publicly report their childbirth complication rates.
Every single year, 700 women die and 50,000 women suffer severe injuries related to childbirth. And black and brown mothers die at three to four times the rate of white mothers. According to reviews of these deaths, these mothers could have been saved with better medical care.
This proposal would be extremely vital to mother’s health, and it needs to be implemented.