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Critical Review

Critical Review: Narratives of deprivation: Women's life stories around Maori sudden infant death syndrome

Introduction

This paper included life story interviews of 19 mothers of Maori children who died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). Participants belonged to both rural and urban settings of New Zealand. As narrated by those bereaved mothers, their life experiences were full of marginalization, alienation and exclusion and that prove their lives lived under serious deprived conditions in a wealthy and comfortable society. These factors are considered to be non-modifiable risk factors which also hinder the development and formulation of policies and interventions of health endorsement that may enhance the circumstances in which Maori babies are lived and raised by their mothers and eventually it will decrease the growing deaths of infants due top SIDS. The paper argue about the new interventions that aim to those who live in these situations and construct on the framework of WHO Social Determinants of Health are important to the habitants of New Zealand in order to acquire health justness and halt the surge of preventable yet disturbing deaths of Maori Babies due to SIDS.

Discussion

This paper holds an important view about the fact that despite of interventions and prevention methods for towing down the deaths due to SIDS, their numbers are increasing among Maori babies. It is often stated that prevention methods have biological basics or other modifiable risk factors such as maternal smoking and prone infant sleeping etc. But there other factors also which are neglected and called non-modifiable risk factors such as socio-economic status of these families (Mitchell et al., 1993, 1992). The rates of SIDS are decreasing in western countries but its increase can be observed among indigenous population of Australia, New Zealand, United States and Canada due to their poverty and poor living conditions.

This ...