Maternal deaths in US spiked in 2021, Black women especially affected

[CitizenVectron]

Maternal deaths in the U.S. spiked in 2021, CDC reports

WWW.NPR.ORG

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After years of high rates, the country hit a new high during the pandemic, far exceeding rates in other developed nations. Black women are at especially high risk.

 

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In 2021, the U.S. had one of the worst rates of maternal mortality in the country's history, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The report found that 1,205 people died of maternal causes in the U.S. in 2021. That represents a 40% increase from the previous year.

 

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The U.S. rate for 2021 was 32.9 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births, which is more than ten times the estimated rates of some other high income countries, including Australia, Austria, Israel, Japan and Spain which all hovered between 2 and 3 deaths per 100,000 in 2020.

 

Primary issue is lack of staff. And stats on difference for Black women:
 

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Yet some experts worry that other trends around the country could make these figures worse, not better, including abortion restrictions that can delay care for pregnancy complications, and staffing problems at hospitals and closures of rural maternity wards.
 

The maternal death rate among Black Americans is much higher than other racial groups; in 2021 it was 69.9 per 100,000, which is 2.6 times higher than the rate for White women.

 

Insane, and horrible.

[Zaku3]

Shithole country not gonna lie.

[CitizenVectron]

Lack of medical staff over the next 10-30 years is going to be unbelievable in its impact on North America. We were already facing a huge shortage with the coming aging of the Baby Boomers, but COVID put that into overdrive with huge amounts of experienced nurses quitting the profession due to burnout and being jaded. In Canada, provincial governments are trying to steal nurses from places like the Philippines (which traditionally has exported a large number to Canada), but there is some controversy because that country is also now facing shortages. 

 

Who would have guessed that an international pandemic where the people more likely to be hospitalized (due to not taking it seriously) were also the most likely to be abusive towards medical staff, and also accuse them of being part of a global conspiracy, etc, would have an impact on people actually wanting to work in hospitals?

[chakoo]

 

Really fucking sad and of course the people who scream loudly over abortions don't actually give a fuck about maternal health or women. This stuff angers me so much.

[Zaku3]

1 minute ago, chakoo said:

 

Really fucking sad and of course the people who scream loudly over abortions don't actually give a fuck about maternal health or women. This stuff angers me so much.

 

I should be super active in that dems and latin thread but stuff like this reminds me it doesn't matter. If we refuse to solve this then we aren't solving problems harder then this. Depressing. 

[Joe]

One thing that I thought was interesting about this study is that Americans are more likely to choose c-section over natural birth. C-sections are far riskier than natural births.

[b_m_b_m_b_m]

1 hour ago, Joe said:

One thing that I thought was interesting about this study is that Americans are more likely to choose c-section over natural birth. C-sections are far riskier than natural births.

There’s a study I read some time ago that links increased c sections towards the end of an OB’s shift so in my mental palace I can link this to the doctor and nursing shortage

[Ghost_MH]

3 hours ago, CitizenVectron said:

Who would have guessed that an international pandemic where the people more likely to be hospitalized (due to not taking it seriously) were also the most likely to be abusive towards medical staff, and also accuse them of being part of a global conspiracy, etc, would have an impact on people actually wanting to work in hospitals?

 

You know what will help with this shortage? More free snacks in the break room. And birthday parties. That'll do it.

 

Better pay and benefits is off the table, because that obviously won't help.

[Greatoneshere]

Talking about lack of medical staff in a broader sense, I'm not as sure on the nursing side, I'll have to ask, but my two younger brothers are both doctors and they said on the doctor side the issue is residency slots post medical school graduation. The need and demand for doctors has increased but doctors need/want to continue getting paid the really nice six figure salaries they make so they won't widen the residency slots so more people can become doctors so the supply/demand chain remains in favor of less doctors, higher salaries per doctor and until that changes the issue will only become worse.

 

And doctors feel entitled to their high salaries because of their long educational road to becoming a doctor (4 years of college, 4 years of medical school, 3+ years of residency depending on the type of residency, then 1-2+ years of fellowship if one decides to specialize further) and those first 8 years of education are expensive so doctors have high student loan debt they need to pay off with those six figure salaries. Obviously the issue there is higher education costs have skyrocketed astronomically over the years, becoming unaffordable over time and that needs to be fixed. Lawyers don't run into this problem because there are no limited amount of slots to becoming a lawyer, hence why the country is full of them and the salary range on lawyers is huge depending on what area of law you work in and at what level - lawyers can be dirt poor working for a non-profit or being a public defender, something like $40,000 or $50,000, then high powered corporate law attorneys can make millions. That's more how it should work with doctors. At the same time you do want a high standard of care (lawyers matter but doctors matter more in this regard) so you want to create more residency slots but perhaps not a free for all.  

 

So it's a bit of a stalemate. Educational institutions need to lower the costs of tuition, etc. so nurses/doctors (everyone in any industry, really) don't have so much debt coming out of school but that won't happen. Then, now that that's the case, doctors won't organize to fight for more residency slots to there can be more doctors, because they want/need the high salaries at that point. An uroboros basically. This is how it's been explained to me on the doctor side at least (I've simplified things of course).

[Guest]

14 minutes ago, Ghost_MH said:

 

You know what will help with this shortage? More free snacks in the break room. And birthday parties. That'll do it.

 

Better pay and benefits is off the table, because that obviously won't help.

The shortage has grown as pay rates have rapidly increased.

 

The real issue is immigration. We import a ton of healthcare staff from overseas and we cut that off in substantial ways during the pandemic and to some degree still are.

[GeneticBlueprint]

Which black woman was especially affected?

[outsida]

5 hours ago, GeneticBlueprint said:

Which black woman was especially affected?

the one in the picture on the wall???

[AbsolutSurgen]

The US is the only developed country without a national healthcare system, yet pays twice the amount of the rest of the developed world on healthcare to get worse results.  It's really not hard to understand.

[Greatoneshere]

And Vox drops an article talking about the residency slots issue right after I mention it in this thread.  

 

 

Why well-qualified medical school graduates can’t get jobs — despite doctor shortages

WWW.VOX.COM

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The US is fighting a modern pandemic with a 1990s-sized workforce.

 

[unogueen]

Medicine is often resilient to the fact that a human isn't just a normalized template. In nursing school we were taught that medical practitioners were often recalcitrant to adaptive treatment based on any number of societal and ethnic factors. People forget that inequality is not just a state, but a tool.