"A death is considered preventable if the committee determines that there was at least some chance of the death being averted by one or more reasonable changes to patient, community, provider, facility, and/or systems factors."
They said that the deaths are preventable, not the conditions themselves.
Deaths by suicide and drug abuse are indeed preventable. Are you misconstruing the word preventable to mean 100% preventable?
Do they consider treatments that couldn't possibly be performed on every pregnancy that it might help? (due to finite medical resources, cost that insurance companies won't pay, etc.)
I'd much rather see a focus on the basics that other countries do that are consistently missed. Especially when it comes to over-using C-sections and how race plays into treatment.
While it's unwise to try and simply reduce all mental health conditions to 'circumstances' or 'chemical imbalance', there are lots of things you can do to keep a person in balance to the point that any latent conditions they have aren't enough of a problem to interfere with their daily lives. Motherhood is already very difficult so it is worthwhile to try and keep as many challenges out of a new mother's life as we can.
By that definition, cancer is preventable. Actually, nearly every possible cause of death is preventable if you're definition is "doing something might reduce risk factors".
That's not the normal usage of "preventable death".
This kind of thing also applies to the oft-repeated "infant mortality" metric. Where other countries don't count premature births or count birth within a certain period as stillbirths instead of infant mortality.
> Among 11 developed countries, the United States has the highest maternal mortality rate, a relative undersupply of maternity care providers, and is the only country not to guarantee access to provider home visits or paid parental leave in the postpartum period.
> Women in the U.S. are the most likely to die from complications related to pregnancy or childbirth.
[edit] NPR did a thing on it in 2017 too. [2] In 2015 you were 7X as likely to die as a mother in the US as compared to Finland (and 4X Canada) - and while the rest of the world saw dropping numbers, the US saw accelerating increases. And for every woman who dies in childbirth in the US 70 come close.
[1] https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2...
For reference (so someone doesn't have to click through): 17.4 per 100,000 vs the two closest: France at 8.7 and Canada at 8.6
Does that account for the far higher proportion of people living in rural areas in the US? What about obesity, ethnicity, etc?
Every place has its economically disadvantaged, but America's poor seem to be more neglected and left behind than in other countries. A lot of other rich countries have better aggregate numbers because they bottom quartile is not as low.
More urbanized than France, Spain, Canada, Taiwan, Switzerland, Italy, etc.
They may have a higher percentage of their populations in rural areas, but the US may have a higher percentage of its population far away from urban medical care.
The rate seems about the same as France and Canada?
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.RUR.TOTL.ZS?contextu...
The measure can be very different elsewhere. The WHO defines a maternal death as "the death of a woman while pregnant or within 42 days of termination of pregnancy, irrespective of the duration and the site of the pregnancy, from any cause related to or aggravated by the pregnancy or its management, but not from accidental or incidental causes."
you'll notice in this study that 30.0% of deaths occurred 43–365 days postpartum, so you will have to adjust numbers accordingly if you are comparing the USA to what most other countries measure. (and not all use the WHO definition!) The reason they use the 42 day cutoff is I assume to aid with other-country comparison. Still lots of websites that compare maternal mortality across the world get this wrong, and compare USA deaths for a full year vs other country deaths for 30-60 days postpartum.