Our results indicate that the WHO MNM tool, in its current form, is not useful for comparison between different resource settings. Detection differs between high- and low-income countries and organ dysfunction-based criteria detect only 38.2% of all women with SMO as defined by the three cohort studies.
Moreover, in cases of maternal mortality and based on the specified criteria, organ dysfunction could not be identified from the medical records in 17 out of 48 cases (35%) in the Netherlands and 15 out of 46 cases (33%) in Malawi. We believe that a revision of the WHO MNM tool and specifically the organ dysfunction-based criteria is needed to enable meaningful comparison between different resource settings.
A recent study by Menezes et al. states that the WHO criteria perform well [12]. In this study, conducted in two Brazilian reference hospitals, 77 out of 1196 (6.4%) women were identified as having life-threatening conditions based on the WHO MNM tool, compared to 33.8% and 80.2% by using Waterstone’s or other literature-based criteria respectively. However, the authors do not clarify why the other 1119 (93.6%) women did not sustain MNM conditions or why these pregnant women did not ‘nearly die, but survived’ (according to WHO MNM definition). The reason for this omission appears that the current WHO criteria are mistakenly seen as the ‘gold standard’ for evaluation of severe maternal morbidity.
The underestimation of severe maternal outcome when applying the WHO MNM tool in its current form remains an important issue. Overall, disease-based criteria show the highest detection of SMO (87.2%) in each type of setting. An explanation for the low detection rate (49.6%) in the Tanzanian population could be the local SMO criteria used in that study. For example, this led to fewer women with PPH (according to the WHO MNM definition of blood loss above one liter) in this cohort, as PPH as such was no separate inclusion criterion in the Tanzanian cohort (in contrast with Malawi) and women were only included if they had received blood transfusion. The intervention-based criteria detected 78.9% of all SMO cases. An explanation for the low detection (45.3%) in the Malawian population is the absence of interventional radiology and an ICU. Both disease-based and intervention-based criteria show higher SMO detection in each setting compared to organ dysfunction-based criteria. The CFRs of the potentially life-threatening populations (fulfilling only disease-based criteria) in low-resource settings remain high (Tanzania 13/123, 10.6%; Malawi 35/336, 10.4% versus 23/2308, 1.0% in the Netherlands). This implies that there is hardly any ‘over-inclusion’ in such settings and that these women should be picked up as SMO in the ‘potentially life-threatening phase’ of their conditions.
The lack of laboratory and clinical diagnostics for detecting organ dysfunction explains underreporting in low-resource settings [6,7,8,9]. Similar detection rates for Tanzania and the Netherlands may seem contradictory because advanced technology in the highly resourced Dutch setting would be expected to lead to a higher detection of SMO. An explanation could be found in the supplemented clinical criteria (such as acute cyanosis, gasping, loss of consciousness etc.) as part of the local Tanzanian inclusion criteria (Table 1). These compensate the lack of extensive intensive care monitoring needed for detection by organ dysfunction-based criteria. This would also explain the low detection numbers in Malawi due to the mainly disease- and intervention-based local inclusion criteria.
Different criteria for SMO used in the three cohorts are the most important limitation of this study. SMO cases, as identified differently by local criteria, are being compared according to a single WHO MNM tool. The consequence may be an underestimation of SMO in low-resource settings as Tanzania and Malawi due to limited available diagnostics. However, this limitation also stresses the fact that application of the WHO MNM tool may differ in different contexts.
Another major issue is that, although WHO uses a threshold of five units, there is no consensus about the number of units of blood transfused, which identifies organ dysfunction [6,7,8,9]. After including every woman in a low-resource setting who received even one unit of blood, results show a more equally distributed ‘life-threatening group’ in all settings, emphasizing that the shortage of blood for transfusion remains a large problem in many low-resource settings [13]. Also, SMO detection rate increased from 38.2% to 46.0% of all SMO cases. This 7.8% increase consists of 228 Tanzanian women (91.9%) and 206 Malawian women (53.4%). This leads to a more realistic comparison between high- and low-resource settings, because PPH is an important cause of SMO and lack of blood compounds this problem [11, 14]. Unfortunately, this is also due to unwillingness and impossibility of relatives to donate, and inadequacy or lack of blood bank storage facilities and transport [6, 7, 11, 15].
Although it is clear that there is an urgent need for monitoring health care delivery in both high- and low-resource settings, it remains difficult to determine which set of criteria should be used. In our opinion, disease-based criteria remain important in all settings, since detection rate is high and does not depend on local protocols. In contrast, for the same reason, intervention-based criteria (such as ICU admission) are of limited use. To prevent ‘over-inclusion’ for disease-based criteria, especially in high-income countries, more strict operational definitions (such as the blood loss threshold defining ‘severe postpartum haemorrhage’) are needed. For low-resource settings, supplemented clinical markers such as gasping, oliguria or jaundice could be included. Also, the threshold of received units of blood should be lowered for organ dysfunction-based criteria [8].