Saving Mothers' Lives: - Public Health Agency for Northern Ireland

36
1 Which mothers died, and why
Table 1.21
Numbers of maternal deaths by National Statistics Socio-Economic Classifi cation (NS SEC) and rates per 100,000
estimated maternities; England and Wales: 2003-05.
Social class of
husband or partner
and partnership status
Direct Indirect Direct and indirect
n n n (%) Rate 95 per cent
CI for rate
Relative
risk
95 per cent
CI for
relative risk
Estimated
maternities*
Compared with managerial and professional
Managerial and
professional
27 25 52 (19) 8.8 6.7 11.5 1.0 590,780
Intermediate 16 20 36 (13) 9.0 6.5 12.4 1.0 0.7 1.6 401,520
Routine and manual 29 35 64 (23) 9.7 7.6 12.4 1.1 0.8 1.6 659,310
Compared with women with employed partners
All employed 72 80 152 (55) 9.2 7.8 10.8 1.0 1,651,610
Unemployed,
unclassifi able or
not stated
31 39 70 (26) 68.5 54.2 86.6 7.4 5.6 9.9 102,150
All women with partners 103 119 222 (81) 12.7 11.1 14.4 1,753,760
Women without partners 20 32 52 (19) 38.6 29.4 50.6 4.2 3.1 5.7 134,743
Employed 11 4 15 (5)
Unemployed 9 28 37 (14)
All women 123 151 274 (100) 14.5 12.9 16.3 1,888,487
*Numbers of maternities by class are estimated from a 10 per cent sample and so do not necessarily add up to the total
for all women.
For women with a husband or partner in employment, the social class differences in mortality were small and
were no bigger than would be expected by chance, as shown in Table 1.21. In contrast, the rate for women
whose partners were unemployed or whose occupations were unclassifi able was over seven times higher
than that for all women with partners in employment. This group of women made up just over a quarter of the
women in England and Wales who died, while only 55 per cent had partners in employment. Nearly a fi fth of
the women appeared to have no partner. Based on the tentative assumptions in the previous paragraph, their
mortality rate was over four times that of women who had partners in employment.
Table 1.22 shows access to antenatal care by employment and partnership status.