Tashkent, Uzbekistan (UzDaily.com) -- The Republican Specialized Scientific and Practical Medical Center for Maternal and Child Health (RSNPMCCHMiR) began its work in the new year with a discussion of current issues and problems. Here recently a meeting was held with the participation of the heads of regional branches of the Center and senior officials of the Ministry of Health of Uzbekistan.

As Natalya Nadyrkhanova, director of the Russian Scientific and Practical Center for Health and Human Welfare, noted when opening the meeting, today the Center combines the functions of three previously existing services - obstetrics and gynecology, reproductive health and maternal and child screening. Thus, the maternal and child health service system has been reorganized so that all the necessary services for women and newborns are provided in one institution, from adolescent care, prenatal preparation and antenatal care to childbirth, postnatal care, selection of a contraceptive method and treatment of gynecological diseases.

Therefore, starting this year, meetings to identify the problems and bottlenecks that exist in this work will be held on a regular basis. And the conclusions and proposals made during their course will be provided to the Ministry of Health of Uzbekistan for analysis and decision-making.

The meeting began with speeches by representatives of the Ministry of Health, who touched upon issues of compliance with current standards of medical services provided, modern regulations in the field of auditing medical institutions, the level of personnel training, close attention to corruption, compliance with financial discipline and others.

During the meeting, directors of branches of the Russian National Research and Medical Center for Medical Protection from 14 regions of the country voiced issues of concern to them. In particular, this is a problem associated with the regionalization of perinatal care, when patients with premature births, with severe concomitant diseases, should be hospitalized in regional-level institutions, and vice versa - care for women without risk factors, with full-term births, should be provided in primary level maternity complexes. The principles of regionalization are not always observed locally, which leads to unjustified hospitalization of patients who do not have obvious pathology in tertiary-level maternity complexes - regional branches of the Russian National Medical Research Center for Children’s Health. This leads to overload of perinatal centers and, accordingly, to a decrease in the quality of medical care for mothers and newborns.

In this regard, the directors of the branches made a proposal to strengthen educational work among the population and medical workers involved in the process of prenatal care. In particular, from the very beginning of a woman’s pregnancy, doctors need to assess the risks of complications for each pregnant woman and, together with them, develop in advance an individual plan for routing for childbirth to a specific obstetric facility. Every pregnant woman should know in which maternity complex she will be delivered. Information about the routing of each specific pregnant woman for childbirth should be available to all maternity complexes at the stage of taking the pregnant woman for antenatal registration.

One of the important tasks, the implementation of which will make the functioning of the maternal and child health service more effective, is the digitalization of the service, including the creation of a unified electronic database of pregnant women. In this case, information about each pregnant woman will be entered into the database at the woman’s first visit to the doctor. The entered information will be available to doctors of maternity centers, including the Russian National Medical Research and Medical Center and its regional branches. Information about the condition of pregnant women will allow you to effectively coordinate its further management by a group of primary care specialists and hospitals, plan consultations with the necessary specialists, and hospitalization in a specialized hospital for treatment and delivery.

The issue of the supply of blood products, which may be needed in large quantities in some cases, was also raised. It is necessary to develop a system for providing advance supplies of blood products for women at high risk of bleeding - at the stage of hospitalization before childbirth.

Another concern for directors of branches of the Republican Specialized Scientific and Practical Medical Center for Maternal and Child Health is polypharmacy or the unreasonable prescription of a significant amount of medications to a patient. There are cases when the condition of patients admitted to the Centers on site is complicated by the previous prescription of several drugs where, according to clinical protocols, the use of 1-3 drugs was necessary. Pharmacies, as experts noted, often dispense medications prescribed simply on pieces of paper - without letterhead or a doctor’s seal, or even just from the words of the buyer. The consequences of excessive drug use also have to be treated later. But any doctor is obliged to be responsible for his prescriptions, which means he has no right to prescribe treatment that is not confirmed by his personal signature and seal.

These and other topical issues and proposals voiced during the meeting formed the basis of the final protocol, which was handed over to the leadership of the Ministry of Health for study. Work in this direction will continue.