The PSD asked for express delivery to parliament on the report on maternal mortalityalleging that the General Directorate of Health promised to send it to the Assembly of the Republic at the end of July, which has not yet happened.
In a request addressed to the resigning Minister of Health, dated Tuesday and released today, the PSD deputies refer that “the Maternal mortality registers a worrying evolution in Portugal“.
“According to the latest data from the National Institute of Statistics (INE) and the General Directorate of Health (DGS), the maternal mortality rate increased substantially in the last three years prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, to 12.8 deaths per every 100,000 births in 2017, 17.2 in 2018 and 10.4 in 2019”, they refer, adding that, in 2020, the maternal mortality rate reached 20.1 deaths for every 100 thousand births, “the highest level in the last 38 years“.
According to PSD deputies, the Director General of Health, Graça Freitas, faced with this increase in maternal mortality, “announced that she had created a commission to investigate the respective causes and analyze the deaths It occurred”.
“But the fact is that, to this day, the results of this work are not known,” they lament.
According to the request, Graça Freitas was confronted on July 19, in a hearing at the Parliamentary Health Commission, with the lack of disclosure of this report, having requested “a few days” to send the same thing to parliament. “It happens that, since then, not only ‘a few days’ have passed, but more than two months and it is that the report has not yet been sent to the Assembly of the Republic”, say the deputies of the PSD, justifying its request to the Ministry of Health.
PSD deputies demand “the sending, as a matter of urgency, of the Report on Maternal Mortality, and its components, including the analysis of the causes of death, in the period 2017/2018and also the “equivalent information reported on maternal mortality for the period 2019 to 2021.”
Source: Observadora
