"When a woman wants to get pregnant, we want her to be in a healthy condition. If she has got any illnesses, once the pregnancy starts, it becomes difficult to try and treat those illness after the pregnancy starts and sometimes to investigate it after the pregnancy starts and you want to be in the best of health before the pregnancy so that you have a good pregnancy and a healthy baby and healthy baby as well. This will also affect how you recover for the delivery also. So maternal health is one of paramount importance in deciding how the pregnancy is going to go forward and how the pregnancy outcome as well. So healthy mother means healthy baby. Not just for pregnancy itself, it also has effect long term with regard to mothers health but with regard to baby’s health too"

"Maternal Health Services is the place where you get care for the mother and the newborn child. This is a place where you for Prepregnancy Care, Pregnancy care, delivery, post delivery. So most of the PHC’s depending on the locality you stay in , you get different level of services and we categorize them depending on the services provide d into primary secondary and tertiary units"

"Lots of factors influence maternal health. The most common that is obvious to all of us is the weight and the anaemic status of the mother. There are women in the villages who are extremely underweight and they are barely around 30 kg and they deliver when they are 35 to 38 kilos. These are very malnourished women and they have protein energy malnutrition. They are severely anemic, their babies are very small and their babies are born anemic. So they have different set of problems. Whereas in our set up, where we see people with better socioeconomic problems, where we have other set of problems like obesity and diabetes, and these itself can create another set of problems that can cause other levels of complication like diabetes in mother, and diabetes in the baby and increasing the rise of diabetes in the baby as they grow up. The factors need to be addressed and if you are anaemic, it has to be corrected. Anaemia is one of the major problems we have looking at a women and looking at her weight is not correct. Another factor is exercise. You may be a normal height and weight ratio, but may be totally unfit. With regards to your fitness and that needs to be fixed. This is the basic facts, these are other factors to be addressed like epilepsy, there may be people with heart disease, or diabetes, thyroid problems. So this has to be address before the persons gets pregnant so that we can optimize their condition and we have less complicated pregnancy as we can hopefully can have a happy pregnancy and a happy baby and mother at the end of it"

"Maternal Health is very important for example if you have heart disease and preexisting heart disease. This will affect how the baby is going to grow and depending on the heart disease, there are ways for us to optimize the condition if they have a septal defect and you can fix that before the pregnancy and we don’t want that complication to happen. If you have heart disease, say valvular heart disease, if you are a mother with a heart problem, you have a child with a heart problem. So genetically there make an effect of mothers illness on the child. Aside from that we don’t correct the cardiac problem or if you become too sick. So early baby in an ICU having its own last of struggle. These are issues we face. Sometimes the pregnancy is compromised where the mother gets very sick and delivery maybe compromised as well and a whole lot of issues can come, other issue can be if you are hypothyroid. If you don’t fix thyroid, depending on the thyroid level, the baby’s brain development can get affected. So there is always an option for us to fix and try and sort these problems out before you get pregnant so that you can decrease the effects of maternal complications which then decrease the effect on the baby as well"

"To improve Maternal Health means if you are planning for a pregnancy, I would suggest to see the obstetrician and gynecologists that they can make an assessment of your condition and see whether there are any other deficiencies that need to be corrected. If you have not had your vaccinations up to date, they can give you that and can reduce the risk of infection during pregnancy and infection affecting the baby during pregnancy. If they can asses if you are underweight and advice you with regards to your weight and if you are overweight or diabetic then you need to try and work on your weight and correct your sugars. Ofcourse the most important thing is that you shod be exercising everyday. Pregnancy and well being is of before pregnancy, during pregnancy and after pregnancy, man, woman and child, so if it is important to start look at exercise most patients don’t do exercise before they get pregnant and they suddenly they starts thinking about this diet, fitness, exercises during pregnancy and that is the wrong way of going about. So improve your health by eating healthy and thinking about diet and exercise before your pregnancy starts"

"Meconium Staining or a normal part of the progression of pregnancy depending on which stage of pregnancy you are. If it is a thin Meconium and if you are in advanced stage of labor and baby heart rate is fine, it is alright for us to continue labor and to anticipate a normal deliver as long as the progression of labor is good and the baby is continuously monitored. Thick Meconium in very early labor tends to be a problem in early labor because it will not case labor to progress though and Meconium could at any time be a sign that the baby is not happy and the outcomes in terms of delivery depends on terms of the history of the women, whether it is the first, second pregnancy or how rapidly she is laboring, is it a normal size baby? How far is she in labor, is it looking like she will deliver quickly, how bad is meconium. So it is not an easy answer to give. It has to be individualized and even with continuous monitoring there is always a risk that there may be some aspiration of the meconium. If going forwards, there is a little distress scenario involves. So there is no one answer for that. It has to be individualized for each person’s care"