Maternal deaths are a remediable injustice

There is a worrying regularity with which unexplained deaths of mothers and their infants occur within both the public and private health systems in Guyana. While investigations are almost always launched after some amount of public pushback, the results of these are not regularly released and even when they are, families rarely get the justice being sought.

One of the standard approaches in dealing with cases of maternal and infant deaths is to either cast the blame on the individuals themselves or the medical practitioner/s attending to them. Through this individual blame approach, no sustainable solutions are ever provided for the issue at hand. There is also the tendency for medical practitioners to blame maternal deaths and injuries on issues beyond their control such as pre-existing conditions or poor nutrition. They rarely ever examine their own practices and the ways in which they perform within hospitals.