Measuring Maternal Mortality and Morbidity in Canada.

Maternal mortality and severe maternal morbidity are devastating for women, their families, and care providers. International efforts have been made to develop and to implement data collection, management, and surveillance systems that capture pregnancy-related information that can be assessed and used to improve health and system outcomes. At present, Canada does not have a national enquiry process to review maternal deaths, severe morbidity, and near misses, and has not set targets for maternal mortality reduction. Maternal mortality rates are critical measures of maternal health and provide important information for analysis of trends and priorities among and within countries. Information about near misses as well as maternal morbidity is crucial to truly understand and to prevent maternal mortality. Canadian experts must work together with governments, provinces, and territories to determine key indicators, measurement, and meaningful data analysis strategies. These data and their comparisons will form the foundation of evidence to guide programs, policies, priorities, and interventions that will ultimately improve the health of mothers and their children.

The accuracy of midwives' clinical breast examination in detection of breast lumps.

BACKGROUND: Screen-detected breast cancers are usually diagnosed at earlier stages. Therefore, countries with limited resources are recommended to implement clinical breast examination (CBE) as a screening method in conjunction with mammography. Since there are so many limitations to performance of CBE by surgeons in the health system and CBE by midwives is more feasible, this study was conducted to test the agreement of CBE by midwives and surgeons. METHODS: One thousand and twenty seven patients with no personal history of breast cancer received breast physical examination by both a midwife and a surgeon and designed forms including patients' general information, cause of referral and abnormal physical findings were completed for each patient. RESULTS: The inter-observer agreement (kappa) for mass detection was 36 % (95% CI= 31% to 41%), indicating a "fair" agreement exists between the midwife's and the surgeon's physical examination. Sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive values of "midwife's physical examination" to detect abnormal breast masses in comparison to "surgeon's physical examination" as the gold standard were 75, 67, 48, and 87 percent respectively. CONCLUSIONS: The results of this study do not justify the replacement of general surgeons by midwives in the health care system as the first examiner for clinical breast screening. Decisions about this issue need more comprehensive studies considering cost-effectiveness and training procedures.