Poisson Regression Modeling of Pregnancy Related Death in Oyo State, Nigeria

Worldwide, Over 600,000 maternal deaths are recorded annually. Many women die due to pregnancy associated complications in Nigeria. Thus, this paper seeks to explore the application of poisson models in the study of incidence of pregnancy related death in Oyo state, Nigeria. The paper explores the application of poisson models in the study of maternal deaths. Understanding the incidence of maternal deaths may provide useful information to policy makers for the development of actionable plan to improve maternal health policies and its implementations. The analysis was based on data sourced from the records unit of the hospital for the period of 2009-2018. Within the 10 year period, a total of 1121 maternal death was observed, with the years 2016 and 2017 recording the highest deaths of 136 and 148 respectively. Also, the mean incidence of maternal deaths remained approximately the same over the period. Based on the result from our analysis, we recommend 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 ten years (2009 - 2018) reference to this general hospital.