Provides practical guidance to move from maternal death reviews to surveillance and response management.

Most maternal deaths are preventable. To end preventable maternal deaths, accurate information on how many women died, where they died and how they died is essential, but is currently inadequate. Maternal death surveillance and response (MDSR) contributes to better information for action by promoting routine identification and timely notification of maternal deaths, review of maternal deaths, implementation and monitoring of steps to prevent similar deaths in the future.

The framework for monitoring and evaluation includes standard indicators based on MDSR principles: maternal death as a notifiable event; facility-, community-, and district-level reviews; data quality; and percentage of recommended responses undertaken. Because the main purpose of MDSR is to take actions to eliminate preventable maternal deaths, the system is failing if this is not happening. In this case, a more detailed evaluation may be needed to assess how the system can function more effectively.

This resource provides support to: identify and notify maternal deaths; conduct a maternal death review; conduct analysis; disseminating results, recommendations and responses; monitoring and evaluating the MDSR system; and developing an MDSR implementation plan.