The health ministry has identified four medical institutes which will act as regional centres and train people in tracking maternal deaths and taking steps to prevent them. The institutes- Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences, Wardha, Institute of OBGYN, Chennai, King George's Medical University, Lucknow and Guwahati Medical College, Assam were identified during a national workshop on 'Strengthening Maternal Death Surveillance Response (MDSR) and Maternal Near Miss (MNM) Review' held recently.

Development partners like the WHO, the UNICEF will also be involved in various activities of implementation of guidelines. The processes of the MDSR and the MNM together help in tracking maternal deaths and understanding their underlying causes. They also stimulate and guide actions to prevent deaths in the future. Sensitisation and orientation of participants towards this thought was the central theme of the workshop, an official statement said.

The new MDSR guidelines are built on the ones released earlier with salient features such as paradigm shift to the response from review, no name-no blame policy, introduction to the confidential review, use of the ICD10 classification for causes of maternal death and use of data for planning of local action, it said. At the workshop, all participants expressed renewed commitment towards implementing and strengthening the MDSR and the MNM in the country. It was attended by the representatives of the health ministry, the National Health Systems Resource Centre along with participants from 33 states and 45 medical colleges.