Objective: This study was designed to determine the Perinatal Mortality Rate at the University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital (UNTH), Enugu, Nigeria at the end of the last millennium. There had been no comprehensive study on this since the inception of the institution in the early seventies.
Methods: A five-year retrospective, hospital based study of the births and deaths of infants under one week of age was carried out. This was done using the birth records in the Labour Ward (LW), and the New Born Special Care Unit (NBSCU) of the hospital. The UNTH is a referral centre in Enugu covering five states in Eastern Nigeria. However, for the purpose of this study, all babies referred from other hospitals, maternity homes etc (BBA's), were not included. All births and deaths from twenty two weeks gestational age to one week after birth were included in the study. The data were collected by the doctors involved in the study from January 1995 to December 1999 inclusive.
Result: Six thousand, three hundred and seventy-six babies were recruited into the study. Out of this number, 5942 were live births, 434 were still births while 411 were early neonatal deaths. Seventy-four babies were dropped from the study (1.16%), due to insufficient information and mutilation of some parts of the records. The total perinatal deaths was 845 giving a perinatal mortality rate (PMR) of 133.94/1000, a high PMR when compared with similar centers in and outside Nigeria.