The access of pregnant women to an appropriate health facility plays a crucial role in preventing maternal deaths. In the last decade, many new steps have been taken in the direction of making motherhood safe, one of them being the availability of free Emergency Medical Response Services (EMRS). In the present investigation, various variables were analyzed of the EMRS which provides services to pregnant women of the tribal district of Western India.

This study is a descriptive analysis of EMRS provided to pregnant women from January 1, 2013 through December 31, 2020. The number of expected pregnancies was obtained from the state data center and the variables related to the benefitted pregnant women were generated with the EMRS tracking software.

The results of this study showed that 93.59% of pregnant women benefitted from these services in the last six years as compared to the estimated number of pregnancies. Whereas in the case of obstetric emergencies, 85.02% of pregnant women benefitted. Most of the beneficiaries were tribal, in the age group of 20-35 years, with lower socio-economic strata. More than 98.0% of pregnant women decided to take the delivery facility in the public hospitals. Across the district, ambulances had to travel less than 10km to cater to 89.0% of pregnant women.

The convenient access of EMRS to pregnant women can improve the indicators of maternal and child health and reduce the risk of maternal death and home delivery.

Low-resource environments, such as those found in humanitarian crises, pose significant challenges to the provision of proper medical treatment. While the lack of training of health providers to such settings has been well-acknowledged in literature, there has yet to be any scientific evidence for this phenomenon.

This pilot study utilized a randomized crossover experimental design to examine the effects of high- versus low-resource simulated scenarios of a resuscitation of a critically ill obstetric patient on a medical doctors’ performance and inter-personal skills. Ten senior residents (fifth-year post-graduate) of the Maggiore Hospital School of Medicine (Novara, NO, Italy) were included in the study.

Overall performance score for the high-resource setting was 5.2, as opposed to only 2.3 for the low-resource setting. The mean effect size for the overall score was 2.9 (95% CI, 1.7–4.0; P <.001). The results suggest a significant decrease in both technical (medical) and non-technical skills, such as leadership, problem solving, situation awareness, resource utilization, and communication in the low-resource environment setting. The latter finding is of special important since it was yet to be reported.

This pilot study suggests that untrained physicians in low-resource environments may experience a considerable setback not only to their professional performance, but also to their interpersonal skills, when deployed ill-prepared to humanitarian missions. Consequently, this may endanger the health of local populations.