With the achievements of the last few years in reducing maternal and child mortality, we face greater challenges going forward to ensure we make further vital progress.
The world’s nations made a set of promises when committing to the UN’s Millennium Development Goals and maternal and newborn health lie at the very heart of these with specific targets that are still off-track. We have a great shared responsibility to act to prevent avoidable death and injury during pregnancy and childbirth and to strive to come closer to the maternal and infant mortality targets.
The political promises and funding commitments from the 2010 G8 Muskoka Summit and the recent follow-up conference in Toronto this year need to be delivered in full. As President Jakaya Kikwete of Tanzania said at the Saving Every Mother, Every Child summit, ‘By doing what we are doing, we are able, around the world, to have mothers have healthy pregnancies, survive those pregnancies, nourish their children and provide their children with the basic resources.’
‘We have to do it because so many lives have been lost, mothers and children,’ added Kikwete. ‘No woman should die while giving life to another human being.’
As we hold political decision-makers and public health officials to account, we must also show that the delivery of funding does indeed result in further improvements at the grassroots level. This means ensuring the availability of health care, investment in quality and meaningful assessment. This supplement could not be timelier as it seeks to address the quality of care for mothers and babies. Its Editors are all long-standing champions of quality of care and bring their shared expertise to bear on the range of issues covered—maternal health, newborn health and stillbirth. The contributors are all internationally recognised experts whose thoughtful work brought together in this supplement makes the case as to why quality is so important.
This supplement is essential reading for anyone with any direct or even tangential professional interest—whether as a funder or a provider or an advocate—and will serve everyone well in the final months of the countdown to the Millennium Development Goal deadline at the end of 2015. Looking forward to a post-2015 global healthcare landscape, there will never be a time when quality is not important and we should start by encouraging the implementation now.