TUHIN SHUBHRA ADHIKARY

Despite notable progress in healthcare, Bangladesh continues to lag behind in ensuring essential maternal and child care, with a significant number of stillbirths and child deaths reported each year, health experts said.

A shortage of trained midwives, a high number of home deliveries, inadequate postnatal care, and limited access to specialised services for small and sick newborns remain major challenges, they added.

Experts stressed the importance of initiating care from the very beginning of pregnancy, increasing facility-based births attended by skilled health personnel, ensuring timely childcare, and raising community-level awareness to improve maternal and neonatal health.

Against this backdrop, Bangladesh, along with the rest of the world, is observing World Health Day today under the theme “Healthy Beginnings, Hopeful Futures”.

The day is being marked just days after the release of two UN reports, which said Bangladesh continues to face critical challenges in maternal and newborn care, with over 1,00,000 child deaths and 63,000 stillbirths reported annually.

The reports were published recently by the United Nations Inter-Agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN IGME).

One of the reports said Bangladesh records over 63,000 stillbirths annually -- equivalent to one stillborn in every 41 births, highest in South Asia.

The other report said more than 1,00,000 children in Bangladesh die before the age of five, with nearly two-thirds of these deaths occurring within the first 28 days of being born.

Asked about the causes behind the high number of child deaths, Prof Iffat Ara Shamsad, former head of the Department of Paediatrics at Dhaka Medical College Hospital, pointed

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