World Health Day 2025: How Essential Emergency and Critical Care (EECC) Can Help Save Mothers and Newborns
On April 7th 2025 the World Health Organization (WHO) will mark World Health Day with a year-long campaign, Healthy Beginnings, Hopeful Futures, focused on improving maternal and newborn health. The goal is clear: to end preventable deaths and ensure that every mother and baby not only survives but thrives. Essential Emergency and Critical Care (EECC) can play a crucial role in achieving this vision.
The Challenge: Preventable Maternal and Newborn Deaths
Every year, nearly 300,000 women die from pregnancy or childbirth-related complications, and over 2 million newborns die within their first month. Tragically, many of these deaths are preventable. The biggest challenges lie in fragile healthcare settings—poor countries, humanitarian crises, and conflict zones—where access to basic yet life-saving medical care is often limited.
WHO’s campaign emphasizes the need for high-quality, accessible care before, during, and after childbirth. It also highlights the need for healthcare providers to listen to women’s concerns and address broader health issues, including mental health and family planning.
How EECC Can Make a Difference
Essential Emergency and Critical Care (EECC) provides low-cost, high-impact interventions that can save lives in resource-limited settings. Many maternal and newborn deaths occur due to complications that could be addressed with basic yet effective care. EECC focuses on the early recognition and treatment of life-threatening conditions, ensuring that critical patients receive the care they need in time.
Key EECC interventions for maternal and newborn health include:
Monitoring vital signs to detect complications early, such as sepsis or preeclampsia in mothers and respiratory distress in newborns.
Providing oxygen therapy to treat conditions like birth asphyxia and maternal respiratory failure.
Administering intravenous fluids to stabilize women with severe bleeding or newborns suffering from dehydration.
Simple airway management techniques, ensuring that babies who struggle to breathe after birth receive immediate help.
Training healthcare workers to recognize and respond to critical illness, particularly in low-resource settings.
A Call for Investment in EECC
Despite its effectiveness, EECC is not yet widely implemented in many healthcare facilities, particularly in low-income countries. Ensuring that every hospital and clinic has the basic resources and trained staff to provide EECC is an essential step toward reducing maternal and newborn deaths.
World Health Day 2025 serves as a reminder that we can and must do more. By integrating EECC into routine maternal and newborn care, we can bridge the gap in healthcare access and save countless lives.
As WHO calls for renewed global efforts to improve maternal and newborn health, let’s ensure that Essential Emergency and Critical Care is part of the solution. No mother should lose her life giving birth, and no newborn should die from a treatable condition.
Together, let’s commit to healthy beginnings and hopeful futures for all.