Topic:
Country: Canada
Delegate Name: Priya Mahabi
Country: Canada
Delegate: Priya Mahabir
School: Forest Hill Central High School
Committee: WHO – ECOSOC
Topic: Maternal Mortality
As the number of women’s deaths in childbirth in the world continues to slow down in decrease in bigger countries and increase in some smaller regions around the world, Canada has been prioritizing its health care through its universal and publicly funded Medicare system. Canada has met the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) for the last thirteen years in a row. The mortality ratio has been twelve out of one hundred thousand, completing the goal of trying to get down to seventy out of one hundred thousand. So far, Canada has been trying to regulate, strengthen, and improve health care, investing in programs that support women and children, and reproductive services. Even though Canada doesn’t have the lowest amount of maternal mortality rates, it has less than the world goal of the SDG.
Canada wants to continue and improve the health system: expanding access to family and mental health services, improving funding, implementing programs both domestically and internationally, and promoting best practices for care and prevention. As of now, the main ways Canada makes mental health services more accessible are through significant federal investments, collaborative agreements with provinces and territories, and targeted initiatives, but as we progress, we want to implement measures to reduce systemic barriers and leverage technology. Making care accessible but also quality is a main problem that Canada tries to work on.
As a more populated country, enforcing a health care system that doesn’t cost as much or is a form of non-profit could not only help Canada, but also less populated countries that don’t have unlimited access to health care. Specifically, Canada needs to improve the data collection in maternal mortality to record if there’s a genetic problem that the nation can look for and avoid the death of a woman and their child. Help within The Public Health Agency of Canada’s Canadian Perinatal Surveillance System (CPSS) since they only collect data relying on vital statistics and hospital discharge data, which do not record not only the maternal mortality data, but also the relationship between the deaths and the detailed symptoms. To increase the data collection, Canada wants to improve their confidential enquiry system, improve the accuracy of existing data by standardizing definitions and linking datasets, and expand surveillance to include granular clinical and social context through local maternity unit reviews. By 2030, Canada wants the maternal mortality rate to be as low as possible.
