Trends And Causes of Maternal Mortality in Damaturu Local Government Area (LGA), Yobe State

Abstract

For several years, complications which include: postpartum hemorrhage, eclampsia, pregnancy induced hypertensions, obstructed labour, ruptured uterus and sepsis have been known to be causes of maternal mortality. This study therefore examines the trends and
causes of maternal mortality from 2011 to 2020 in the study area. A time-series analysis was adopted as the research design and a multistage stratified sampling technique was used for this study at the first stage. Thus, the local government area was first split into two
strata namely urban and rural political wards. A systematic sampling was then adopted in the sampling of three urban and three rural political wards in the study area. A purposive random sampling technique was then used by the researcher in the administration of
questionnaires only to the affected family members specified by the community heads, as the information on the deceased could only be gotten from their siblings or households. The study used descriptive statistics for the analysis of data. The findings further revealed the
major obstetric causes of maternal mortality which are direct causes such as postpartum hemorrhage, Eclampsia/ High Blood Pressure and sepsis. Postpartum hemorrhage is the most important cause of maternal mortality in the study area. The trends of the maternal
mortality based on the data from two health care facilities revealed that 2015 and 2018 had highest maternal deaths of 60 and 77 respectively. Also, 2015-2018 recorded the highest MMR of 956 and 1,586 per 100,000 live births respectively. The R value of 0.78 revealed high level of correlation between maternal mortality and socio-economic factors. However, the study further reveals that there is no significant differences in maternal mortality in the urban and rural areas. In view of this, the following recommendations are made by this study. That, the government should integrate people’s believes, cultures and traditions into the healthy intervention to bring out their negative consequences in order to curb the high infant mortality rate, and health workers should be involved in house to house sensitization and mobilization of pregnant women for antenatal care.