Maternal and child health-related indicators comprise two of the eight development goals in the United Nations Millennium Development: Nursing Assignment, TCD, Ireland

Maternal and child health-related indicators comprise two of the eight development goals in the United Nations Millennium Development Goals thus reducing child mortality and improving maternal health by a reduction of three-quarters in maternal mortality, and universal reproductive health by 2015. According to WHO a maternal death is defined as “the death of a woman while pregnant or within 42 days of termination of pregnancy, irrespective of the duration and the site of the pregnancy, from any cause related to or aggravated by the pregnancy or its management but not from the accidental or incidental cause.

Maternal deaths are classified into; Direct obstetric deaths: those resulting from obstetric complications of the pregnant state from interventions, omissions, incorrect treatment, or from a chain of events resulting from any of the above and Indirect obstetric deaths, those resulting from previous existing disease or disease that developed during pregnancy and that were not due to direct obstetric causes but that were exacerbated by physiologic consequences of pregnancy.

Maternal mortality prevalence is generally expressed as the number of maternal deaths per 100,000 live births, as the number of maternal deaths per year per 10,000 women of reproductive age, or as the lifetime chance of dying from pregnancy

Due to other challenges, different countries have different sources of information regarding maternal deaths, namely Death notification systems, Hospital-based surveys, including health management information statistics, Population-based surveys, including the sisterhood method, Community-based continuous surveillance systems, Reproductive Age Mortality Studies.

However, these sources have a tendency to under-report death and lack information on pregnancy status and the death causal, which makes it impossible to classify a death as maternal. For instance, hospital-based surveys are useful in investigating the factors contributing to in-hospital maternal death even though, in Malawi 45% of births are missed because they occur outside a health facility and that in-hospital deliveries generally concern a selection of high-risk women or emergency admissions leading to a considerable but unknown bias in the estimate.