Fifty years of Sudanese hospital-based obstetric outcomes and an international partnership

Objective: To present 50 years of hospital-based maternal and perinatal outcomes in Sudan, and the role of an international collaboration with an Irish maternity hospital, over the period 2002-2009, in recent health-indicator improvements.

Design: Retrospective descriptive study.

Setting: Omdurman Maternity Hospital, Sudan.

Population: All women who delivered at Omdurman Maternity Hospital, and their newborn infants, from July 1957 to October 2007, comprising 339 448 births.

Methods: The original logbook data was extracted. Infant and maternal health indicators were calculated according to World Health Organization definitions.

Main outcomes measures: Total annual births, maternal mortality ratio and maternal complications, neonatal mortality and stillbirth rates, and rates of delivery methods.

Results: Total births increased 50-fold from 499 in 1958 to 24 913 in 2007. Significant reductions in morbidity and mortality began in the mid-1990s. From 2001 to 2007, maternal mortality fell from 329 to 36 per 100 000 live births: an 85% reduction. Stillbirth rates almost halved, from 35 to 19 per 1000 births in 2001 and 2007, respectively. Neonatal mortality rates remained largely static, at 24 per 1000 live births in 2007, but there is recent evidence of a decline.

Conclusion: This hospital-based data offers a unique historical portrait of health outcomes in one of the largest maternity hospitals in Africa, and shows steady, sustained improvements in maternal, stillbirth and neonatal mortality rates since the 1990s. The partnership was associated with a number of positive infrastructural, educational, and staffing achievements. Whether it directly contributed to improved health outcomes has not been established.