Abstract:

Background: In Sub-Saharan Africa there are about 880,000 stillbirths which occur annually, 60% of which affect poor and rural families [2]. In Tanzania, approximately 47,000 stillbirths occur each year. This corresponds to a rate of 25.9 per 1000 births which is the ninth highest rate worldwide [3]. Stillbirth rates are particularly high in low-income countries because of many factors associated with poverty, such as poor access to basic obstetric care, lack of skilled birth attendants, and high burden of infectious morbidities where by factors such as ignorance, poverty, and negative sociocultural and faith beliefs are impediment to stillbirth’s prevention [4, 5].

Objective: Pattern of stillbirth for women attending at Bugando medical centre, Mwanza from 2014-2020.

Methods: A retrospective review of records of women who had stillbirths at a tertiary hospital of the BMC was conducted. The study period was one month from October 2020 to November 2020. The hospital maternity registers were used to identify the women who gave birth during the study period. Data collected using a data collection from designed for the study. The data collected included maternal age, parity, gestation, mode of delivery, obstetric complications, infant or foetal’s gender and weight, whether the birth was fresh stillbirth or macerated and cause of stillbirth.

Results: There were 36688 deliveries during the one months of the study. The hospital-based stillbirth rate was 29.27 per 1000 delivery, with 548% being macerated.