When her water broke one afternoon in mid-February, 19-year old Yanny Trejo didn’t rush. Instead, she stayed in her sweltering shack on a hill overlooking Caracas until she knew she was about to give birth. Then she climbed the steep stairs out of the slum and made the 30-minute trip to hospital.

Trejo was fortunate that friends who had recently given birth had advised her not to go too early.

“You have to arrive when your baby is just about to crown,” she told IRIN. “If not, they will send you away to another hospital, then that hospital will send you to another, and it just keeps going.”

At the state-run Conce