Poisson Regression Modeling For Incidence of Maternal Deaths In Ghana

Abstract

The death of a woman while performing her naturally mandated duty of childbirth remains sad and sensitive to every nation worldwide. This paper seeks to explore the application of Poisson models in the study of incidence of Maternal Deaths at Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital – Kumasi, Ghana. Analyses were based on data available at the Obstetrics & Gynecology directorate of the Hospital for the period 2000-2010. We found that within the eleven (11) year period, a total of 1,223 maternal deaths occurred with the years 2008 and 2009 recording the highest deaths of 138 and 144 respectively. Also, the mean incidence of maternal deaths remained approximately the same over the period. The results also show that compared to year 2010, the incidence of maternal death was significantly high in 2004, 2005 as well as 2008. We conclude that management and government reevaluate all existing intervention programs for reducing maternal deaths since they seem not to have yielded the expected results over the past eleven years (2000 - 2010) reference to this teaching hospital.

Key words: Poisson Regression Model, Bio-statistics, KATH