Investigating about the causes of neonate's death in the hospitals of Isfahan Province

Effort for enhancing health and reducing mortality of neonates is valuable from different viewpoints and its benefit is not limited only to neonatal period, but involves all the life of man. Although some efforts have been made and despite the reduction of infant's mortality by 50% in our country, there was not much success in decreasing neonatal mortality. With regarding that the majority of neonatal death occurs in hospital and since studying causes of it is important for choosing a proper intervention, the researcher decided to perform present study. This research is a cross-sectional descriptive study. Research community was all of the dead neonates in hospitals of Isfahan Province from April of 2005 to April of 2006 and sampling was performed by census method among the neonates of research community that were qualified to enter the research. The needed data were extracted through considering medical documents (clinical files of neonates). Descriptive statistics was used for analyzing the data. From 578 neonatal death cases occurred during the period of research, most frequency of neonatal death was related to hospitals that had NICU ward (43.4%), also most frequency of neonatal death causes in hospitals having NICU ward and also in hospitals without NICU ward was related to problems resulted from prematurity (44.6% versus 42.6%), congenital abnormalities (23.5% versus 21.3%) and Respiratory Distress Syndrome (RDS) (11.6% versus 12.7%), respectively, and in hospitals of other cities of mentioned Province the problems resulted from prematurity were (47.5%), RDS (18.1%) and Congenital abnormalities (12.4%). The results of this research revealed that more effort for preventing premature births, referring mothers who are exposed to premature delivery to centers having NICU ward and qualitative and quantitative enhancement of NICU wards is necessary and researcher hopes that with becoming executive the prenatal regionalization program in hospitals in future, these goals will be accessible.