The simple sheet that could prevent deaths in childbirth

A woman dies from postpartum haemorrhage every 12 minutes, but an innovative plastic drape could save tens of thousands of lives a year. Liz Cookman reports from Africa

- Liz Cookman

An innovative plastic drape could save tens of thousands of women's lives from excessive bleeding during childbirth, according to new research - and could be manufactured for less than a dollar.

A woman dies from postpartum haemorrhage somewhere in the world every 12 minutes. It is the leading cause of maternal death, killing almost 43,000 mothers every year, and diagnoses are rising globally. Yet many of these deaths do not need to happen, because the tools to prevent them already exist, according to a new three-part series published in the influential medical journal The Lancet. Among them is a low-cost plastic sheet that measures blood loss so that lifesaving treatment can be triggered sooner.

“Women are bleeding; the blood goes into bedsheets and kidney dishes, or onto the floor,” says Adam Devall, Professor of Maternal Health Clinical Trials at the University of Oxford. “Commonly, even in high-income settings, healthcare professionals are estimating this blood loss, but visual estimation is wildly inaccurate.”

If a plastic drape is put under the woman after she has given birth, the blood collects and is measured by warning lines. This allows for early detection of postpartum haemorrhage and vital early treatment of a condition that is a “race against time”, according to Devall.