WIHI - A Podcast from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement

Date: July 15, 2010 Featuring: Nana Twum-Danso, MD, MPH, FACPM, Director, Project Fives Alive! Jo Ivey Boufford, MD, President, New York Academy of Medicine Sue Gullo, RN, MS, Managing Director, Institute for Healthcare Improvement   It’s difficult to assess just how much progress is being made in the decades-long battle to prevent women from dying during pregnancy and childbirth. In April, The Lancet reported that worldwide maternal death rates dropped significantly from 1980 to 2008. The good news wasn’t uniformly shared across the 181 countries studied, but some global health experts felt there was reason for optimism. In May, the Kaiser Family Foundation presented a more sobering picture, suggesting that efforts to fulfill the United Nations Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of reducing maternal mortality by 75 percent by 2015 were not on track.   At the same time, new initiatives in some of the poorest parts of the globe are successfully targeting maternal health and delivering healthy prognoses fo