Re: Stillbirth: are we making more progress than we think? A
retrospective cohort study.
[Author’s title] The harsh conditions forced Chinese doctors to be
more careful
Sir,
We read with interests the article by
Roshan
J Selvaratnam and colleagues, entitled ”Stillbirth: are we making more
progress than we think? A retrospective cohort study”. In the article,
the authors retrospectively analyzed the maternal characteristics on the
probabilities of stillbirth of the newborn. This study provided
important information about the population rates of stillbirth during
recent decades of years. It suggests that population rates of stillbirth
are falling faster than generally appreciated.
However, multiple factors might contribute to the decrease of
stillbirth, the overloaded of medical staff under the background of
ongoing doctor-patient contradiction might be one, especially in China.
The prevalence of stillbirth was 13.2 per 1000 births in China in
2015–2016. In Shanghai, the average perinatal mortality rate in recent
25 years is 5.97 per 1000 births, and the rate has been decreasing year
by year in the past 25 years. However, behind the success is group of
doctors who had made overloaded sacrifices and they have been
confronting with unprecedented pressure in their daily work. It has been
too common the emotion of families could be out of control and even go
to extremes when the stillbirth appeared, no matter it could be avoided
or not,which could even become malignant injury or kill medical event,
though the medical staff had done nothing wrong in most conditions.
Although violence against health professionals is a global concern,the
scale, frequency, and viciousness of attacks on medical workers in China
are particularly severe.
Promisingly, the government has been improving political management,
such as risk classifications of all pregnant women, to reduce maternal
and neonatal mortality, and laws had been introduced to protect medical
staff in recent years. The ideal of status would be the balance of the
decrease of stillbirth and the protection of medical staff. However, it
is an arduous task and the road is long.
Rui-hong Xue1,MD
1Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology,
International Peace Maternity and Child Health Hospital, School of
Medicine, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China