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Preconception Care: Ensuring Safe Motherhood And Healthy Babies
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There’s some conditions in women that could affect the outcome of the pregnancy even before they get pregnant. These conditions are there, be it medical conditions or social conditions.
Understanding Preconceptional Care
Preconceptional care is the care of a woman before she gets pregnant. A woman of reproductive age, before she gets pregnant, in order to identify and prevent medical conditions or social conditions that can affect the outcome of the pregnancy. Also, to know the things that can limit a safe delivery of a healthy baby to a happy mother and a happy family.
If you agree with me that there are conditions in a lot of people that will remain in pregnancy or even get worse because of pregnancy, and these conditions could result in a bad outcome like a baby being dead and the mother being dead. Or even if she’s not going to die, she’s going to have a lot of complications because of the conditions that were there before she got pregnant.
So, it is very important to identify these conditions prior to pregnancy and preferably not in less than three months before pregnancy. And of course, after identifying if it is possible to prevent them from coming up again or better still to treat them in order to have a good outcome.
Identifying Risk Factors
Some examples of this condition include:
1. Hypertensive Woman
There are different types of hypertension; those that come up only in pregnancy, and we have those people with hypertension even without being pregnant. So, that means this group of people should be identified on time and appropriately taken care of before pregnancy. Or another group of patients include patients like sickle cell disease patients.
2. Sickle Cell
We already know some of the problems are treated with sickle cell disease, and we cannot lie to you that pregnancy is very dangerous, very stressful on a sickle cell patient. So, that means such patients should be seen before she gets pregnant in order to optimize, maximize the outcome of the pregnancy.
3. Diabetic Patient:
Another important medical condition is diabetic patient, a nondiabetic patient should be seen.
4. Epilepsy:
These conditions are not going to prevent them from getting pregnant. So what do you do? You identify them, you prevent all these conditions, and optimize them before they get pregnant to have a very good outcome to both the mother and the baby.
5. Illicit Drug
This condition may not be common in our environment like an adolescent or even young people taking illicit drugs and alcohol. Some people even take drugs, all kinds of drugs that are even recommended in the hospital. They have been prescribed in the hospital. One should not get pregnant while taking these drugs, so this group of people, they require preconception care.
Comprehensive Assessment
What do we do in preconceptional care? We say, this group of women, if you know there is any of this condition or some other condition they present, you have to visit the hospital to be seen, preferably like three months before you attempt to get pregnant.
Your history is going to be taken, like interaction to determine the extent of this condition or better still to even diagnose how severe these conditions are and subsequently, and they will be able to classify our deficiencies and give the proper care to such patients.
This is the part of clerking. During this visit, also, your health professionals are going to examine, do proper examination from head to toe to examine any condition maybe as a Sequelae or a complication of the conditions we are talking about or even another thing that the person may not even be aware that is present in her that could actually worsen during the course of pregnancy or meditate against save a mother would so because of this examination is a cogent part of this care other things include.
You may need to do some tests to do some basic tests apart from knowing how words those conditions are these tests are also going to be like baseline whereby if there is going to be any subsequent deterioration or like change in the result of this test we can actually compare to the baseline results that we already have in order to know how the conditions are going.
The last part of it, after this test, some other things that we don’t like, we call them treats. This particular condition; Do you need drugs? Do you need some corrective surgeries? All this may have to be done even before the pregnancy comes up.
Let’s take it one after the other. In history, the interaction with the patient; for example, we may be able to tell if a sickle cell disease patient is having a frequent crisis and with this frequent crisis we may need to do a particular counseling to really determine when it is suitable for the patient to get pregnant.
Other things include things like she has had in the past even in previous outcomes of previous pregnancies that could tell how this intended pregnancy could go, how far it could go, or how bad it could become. Because of this history of previous delivery, as she had then told you before or a diabetic patient, is there anything in the history that would tell us has involved other systems even beyond the common system that the organ affects, like we say, like a hypertensive patient.
We know, majorly, it could affect the heart. Few people will know that it could affect the kidney division, also the eyes. Because of this detailed examination done and before this examination, detailed counseling to interact properly asking one or two questions like a sickle cell disease patient should actually know the PCV, which is the packed cell volume of blood that she normally has even before pregnancy since, in pregnancy automatically, this blood volume will come down, but we can know before pregnancy this value and appropriately monitor during pregnancy and in examination, this may call for, like a multi-disciplinary approach whereby apart from the observations seeing this patient, it may be needed, like internal medicine physicians like a cardiologist, runner physicians, they may need to see among other disciplines in order to have all hands on deck to have a good outcome in the pregnancy.
As for the reason that visiting multi-expert approach is going to be used whereby everybody is going to be present with the aim of optimizing the woman pre-pregnancy and even subsequently when she gets pregnant, she is going to have a very good outcome and of course some of these tests are also very important because they are going to be done.
For example, you really want to test how bad division of a diabetic patient is how functional is the heart how deteriorated is a kidney function in a woman that’s had transplant before, these are conditions that they need to come to the hospital for, and a person that is on drugs like an epileptic patient on.
Treatment and Prevention
Some of their drugs could bring about malformations in the baby. In view of the fact that you really want to talk to them to know the kind of drug they use, do some tests to know how bad they are and subsequently on that treatment, you will need to remove some drugs and replace those drugs with ones that are safer with pregnancy.
In pregnancy, you replace them so it gives better outcomes rather than having drugs that could bring about malformation or miscarriage. They are going to be removed and start taking folic acid. It is said that folic acid should be in the system like three months before pregnancy. In fact, there are some groups of women that require higher doses of folic acid compared to other patients, and of course, this will have to be done during this preconceptional care.
Other people include a woman in the past who has had delivery of a congenitally malformed baby. You don’t just take it to chance because this could reoccur; rather, it is better to put some things in measure that will reduce this risk, and this will be done during preconceptional care.
Finally, the woman can be optimized when she gets pregnant. The outcome of the pregnancy will reduce unnecessary intervention of the condition on the outcome of the pregnancy and subsequently with pregnancy.
Timely Registration
I encourage women to register on time. This will tell us that preconceptional care is very necessary for some groups of women. And during this time, interaction, examination, and some tests and some prescriptions have to be done for this woman in order to have a safe delivery.
Conclusion: Empowering Women for Safe Pregnancies
Preconceptional care empowers women to make informed decisions, reduce risks, and ensure safe pregnancies and deliveries.
