We believe that all mothers should have access to safe and clean emergency obstetric care. Our work in maternal health aims to ensure that mothers can return home with their beautiful newborns, without having to worry about surgical complications.

 

• Emergency caesarean sections are often one of the most common surgical operations in low- and middle-income countries, and post-cesarean surgical site infections (SSI) are reported to occur in 3% to 15% of patients, some of the highest rates across all surgical operations.

• Though these infections may be easily resolved in higher-income regions, they can be devastating physical, emotional, and financial burdens to the mother and her family in low-resource areas.

• SSIs are associated with a maternal mortality rate of up to 3%, which will only increase as the rate of caesarean sections increases globally.

• While massive global efforts have been made to lower the incidence of SSIs, the number of SSIs due to antimicrobial resistant pathogens has increased even as the SSI rates have decreased. Recent reports of resistance in up to 51% of patients with SSI highlight this issue as an increasing global concern.

 

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At WSIS, we are targeting the overarching issues of maternal health and antimicrobial resistance through a multi-pronged approach and interdisciplinary teams of surgeons, physicians, nurses, microbiologist, educators, and researchers. By devising solutions that are more holistic, we are able to create layered, systemic changes that provide quality improvements to a cross-section of problems, rather than just one single aspect. As an example, our work on providing programing that incentivizes proper pre-operative antibiotic surgical prophylaxis, helps lower the rates of surgical site infection, prevent the contraction of antimicrobial resistance pathogens, and contribute to lowering the rate of maternal mortality by preventing caesarean section-related deaths.