Dr. Brunda Channapa

"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 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"

"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"