Anna Meenan, MD, FAAFP: The legal system is definitely the stumbling block, but if OB's were really serious about working with and supporting midwives, it might be possible to put in place legislation protecting receiving hospitals and OB's in all states.One OB, Garry E. Siegel, described how a malpractice attorney advised his practice to specifically state that they did not participate in home births in any way, as a cover-your-butt policy:
Ronald E. Ainsworth, MD, FACOG: It's not just the legal system per se. My malpractice carrier will not cover me for any birth that is a planned out of hospital delivery that I agreed to provide backup coverage for. I'm a proponent of patient choice and autonomy, but not at the risk of my career or financial ruin to myself and my family....It's not just "boost rates or cancel insurance," my carrier excludes any coverage for malpractice arising out of a prearranged relationship with a patient who attempts out of hospital delivery. That means I would be practicing bare. NO THANK YOU!!
A couple of years ago we had a little "run" of home births, likely planned, in our CNM patients. Long story short, while not debating the safety of home birth (because there are studies that likely prove it is OK in low risk patients, though it would take a gigantic study to show a difference if one exists), a wise attorney from our Med Mal carrier asked us if we TOLD patients up front that we don't participate. Well, we didn't, but now all new OB patients read and sign a form that includes, among other things, a statement that says:Obstetrician Barbara Nichol talked about how terrible it is to be sued--something that almost all OBs experience at least once during their careers. Her remark was set in a longer comment about the need to treat home birth transfers respectfully, rather than antagonistically:
This practice does not participate in home births in any capacity.
If patients want to discuss this, we don't accept them or discharge them.
If they deliver at home "behind our back," we were up front! (Jan 28, 2008)
90 percent of us get sued. It's an unbelievably awful experience even when you did nothing wrong, and it's worse when there's some real question on that point. I admit to a lot of frustration and upset when an obvious litogen (e.g. local favorite: refusing GBS prophy because 'antibiotics cause asthma', don't get me started on this nightmare of junk science) walks through the door, but communicating those emotions to the patient just starts things off on the wrong foot altogether, as I'm sure y'all know already.Litigation isn't always about who is truly at fault, but about who has the deepest pockets. Because many home birth midwives choose not to carry malpractice insurance--including the CNM I used for Dio's birth--if there is a lawsuit, it will often pass onto those with the largest insurance premiums, regardless of fault. From a discussion about liability when a physician assumes care for a home birth transfer:
Unfortunately, IMHO, the hooker here is the legal system. When a patient who chooses OOH birth does have a problem, and is brought to the hospital (as RESPONSIBLE midwives will do), it's often the physician and the hospital who bear the brunt of the family's anger and frustration, and often find themselves in a lawsuit, brought on by a patient with whom they have not had the opportunity to develop rapport, etc. That's why many obs are unwilling to support this situation. Is this fair? probably not. It is, however, sometimes a matter of self-preservation. (Larry Glazerman MD, St. Luke's Center for Advanced Gynecologic Care, Nov 26 2006)A midwife on the OB-GYN-L list responded to Dr. Glazerman:
Unfortunately, Dr. Glazerman, you're correct. The distrust and antipathy goes both ways, though. Women who transfer from a home birth are often treated very rudely by physicians and hospital staff, even to the point of having CPS called b/c they attempted home birth. Midwives' records are ignored and patients treated as if they had no prenatal care. Time is wasted and valuable information ignored. (Jamie, Nov 27, 2006)Another physician, D. Ashley Hill, joined the conversation and added these remarks:
As the recipient of several surprise train wrecks from planned home deliveries or lay birth deliveries gone bad, I agree that very often "the hospital" and "those doctors" end up being the bad guys. Most patients are not pleasant after 6 hours of hard pushing followed by an eclamptic seizure and postpartum atony with hemorrhage. Typically they don't like hospitals or physicians to start with and are on the lookout for anything else to go badly.I was also surprised that many OBs feel trapped by the system, portraying themselves as victims and malpractice lawyers as The Big Bad Guys. Physicians comment about how ACOG "is a hostage of the legal system," how "the legal system is the king (or queen)," or how "trial lawyers run the whole show."
What many of our non-US colleagues may not know is that in our legal system the lawyers preferentially attack the party with the best insurance, regardless of the level of fault, therefore there is little impetus for lawyers to go after the person who attended the home delivery. Instead, they go after the doctor and the hospital where the patient ended up when things went awry at home. (Nov 26 2006)
Hospitals are drawing up emergency plans for dealing with a shortage of midwives.However, this does not necessarily mean a blanket moratorium on home births. While asking all women to birth in hospital makes sense from a staffing point of view, it also increases their risk of being exposed to the virus.
Home births would be refused and planned caesarean sections abandoned if there were not enough staff to carry them out safely.
Ante-natal tests to check the health of the expectant mother and check for foetal abnormalities could be delayed, or even stopped, under separate guidance being agreed by medical experts.
The Government has made planning assumptions that up to one in three people in Britain could become infected with the swine flu virus by the end of winter, putting huge strains on the NHS.
But Luton and Dunstable Hospital Foundation Trust said it hoped to keep its home birth service going, rather than adding to pressures on hospitals dealing with swine flu patients. A spokesman said that women who had booked caesarean sections might be asked if they would switch to a traditional birth, reserving slots for emergencies.
Belinda Phipps, from the National Childbirth Trust, said that during a pandemic, pregnant women were more likely to want a home birth, in order to keep away from hospitals.
Many women would be disappointed, she said, given that there are already not enough midwives to give a home birth to everyone who wanted one.
She said: “In a situation like this, what we would want to see is more women given home births.
“It would reduce the risk of cross-infection, but hospitals are between a rock and a hard place, because they are already short of midwives.”
Bringing more women into hospital would increase the risks of them contracting the virus, she said, but it was the only way to meet demand when there were more pregnant women than midwives available.
At Ridgeview Medical Center in Waconia, women can now give birth in rooms with whirlpool tubs and wi-fi. At Fairview Southdale, new moms can hire a massage therapist or a portrait photographer. Even Hennepin County Medical Center has upgraded its maternity ward, with pastel decor and a deep tub for water births. All three are part of a major marketing offensive by hospitals to win a coveted demographic: mothers....When I was a graduate student, I took the tour of the new maternity wing and NICU at our large university hospital. Much of the PR material emphasized the maternity wing's hotel-like amenities, such as room service, internet access, and "custom beds" (which are the same kind used in just about every other hospital, the Stryker Adel). I was quite happy to see large whirlpool tubs in every labor room. Waterbirths were allowed, although when I was there none of the midwives or doctors were really doing them. I hope that has since changed. Overall, I was definitely underwhelmed with the multi-million dollar renovation.
Many women have taken childbirth preparation to a new level. Bombarded by marketing from retailers such as Babies "R" Us and websites such as babycenter.com, and inspired by reality shows such as "Maternity Ward" and home birth videos on YouTube, this generation has grand ideas about labor and delivery.
Some tour multiple hospitals before deciding where to deliver. Insurance policies mostly let women go where they want, though they might be constrained by where their doctor can practice. "[Childbirth is] a business that's very competitive," said Ted Blank, director of marketing at HCMC. "It's a planned thing and they have the luxury of shopping around."...
Obstetrics doesn't enjoy the fat profit margins of specialties such as orthopedics or heart care. But it makes up the difference in customer loyalty. For many women, it's their first time in a hospital. "If that's not a positive experience, they're not likely to come back," said Meri Beth Kennedy, birthplace director at Fairview Southdale, which redid its maternity wing a year ago....
The marketplace is so competitive that Fairview Southdale has an advisory board made up of women who have given birth there. To read the rest of the article, click here. The article is 4 pages long, so be sure to read the whole thing.
And a few other pictures from this past week
Senator Lindsey Graham, the engaging South Carolina Republican, lectured the Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor last week that if he had made a comment like hers that a “wise Latina woman” often reaches better conclusions, it would have a been a career-ender.And if you don't have time to read the editorial, you can always watch the Colbert Report's take on the Neutral Man's Burden:
The cable-news commentators concurred and the nominee, playing the create-no-waves confirmation game, expressed regret. Actually, her remark was rational and Mr. Graham’s analysis flawed.
Suppose, for example, he had said: “I would hope that a wise, white Southern male with the richness of growing up in South Carolina would more often than not be more sensitive on the issue of race relations than a white Northerner who hasn’t lived that life.” While some might have disagreed, most of his constituents would have agreed, and his future would be as bright as ever....
What endures, however, is the spectacle of middle-aged, white Republicans lecturing the first Latin female nominee about the irrelevance of race, gender and life experiences for a judge. Even Mr. Graham, one of the more enlightened lawmakers — a strong immigration advocate and a thoroughly modern Republican — didn’t get it.
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| The Word - Neutral Man's Burden | ||||
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The June 2009 issue of Birth contains the results of a pilot study gauging the effects of modifying the labor room to encourage mobility, reduce stress and anxiety, and discourage routine medical intervention. Investigators randomly allocated 62 healthy women in spontaneous labor to either a modified room or the standard labor room. Women attended by midwives or doulas were excluded from participating, effectively creating a study population not predisposed to be mobile in labor.As Goer noted, the results were promising, although the sample size was quite small (it was just a pilot study):
Changes to the labor environment were relatively modest. The most radical innovation was to remove the labor bed, replacing it with a portable double-sized mattress and pillows in the corner of the room on the floor....Rooms were also equipped with a birth ball, a chair that promoted sitting upright or leaning forward, an LCD projector with a selection of movies of calming nature images, an mp3 player with a selection of music, and a chart illustrating upright labor and birth positions. All labor rooms had a private bathroom and lacked windows. No nursing alterations were made other than mandating intermittent auscultation, leaving the overhead light off, keeping the door closed, and putting a sign on it asking people to knock before entering.
The trial was too small to draw firm conclusions, but the results certainly support conducting a larger one. Sixty-six percent of the women in the modified room reported spending less than half of their time in labor in bed versus 13% of women in the standard room, and only 35% spent three-quarters or more of their time in bed versus 87% of women in the standard room. (The bed was brought back at the woman’s - mostly for epidural analgesia - or caregiver’s request.) Women in the modified room were significantly less likely to have oxytocin augmentation (40% vs. 68%), and those who had it got it later in labor. Women also had somewhat shorter labors on average and longer times to initiation of analgesia/anesthesia.I found another article discussing this research at VOA News: Re-Thinking Delivery Room Design Eases Labor. The lead researcher, University of Toronto nursing professor Ellen Hodnett, conceived of the study after noting women's behavior when they were giving birth at home. They moved around a lot and used household furniture to aid their labors. She commented:
They used a dining room table to lean over. They used the bathtub. They walked around the garden. They were moving, or on all fours, or side-lying on a mat on the floor… a variety of things…And that struck me, even then, that there were more opportunities, more ways for a woman to help herself to be more comfortable and perhaps her labor to be more effective if she were not confined to a bed.Particularly interesting were Hodnett's comments on how the presence of a bed in a central location predisposes women to staying in bed, rather than moving around:
Doctors and midwives agree it's better for a woman to move around while she's in labor. Walking and changing position makes her more comfortable and helps the labor progress. But in many countries, women giving birth in hospitals are often instructed to lie in bed while their labor progresses.Goer also noted how the presence of a delivery bed influences women's mobility in labor:
University of Toronto nursing professor Ellen Hodnett observed that in many modern - and even some not-so-modern hospitals - a bed was at the center of the labor room.
"That bed is a problem," Hodnett says. "Because it's a central focus of the room, and it sends messages that that's where you're supposed to be in labor. And yet, we have pretty good evidence that spending long periods of time in bed, particularly confined in the way that a hospital labor bed confines you, is not conducive to normal, healthy labor progress."
The investigators noted that the bed is a major reason for lack of mobility. Its prominence conveys that it is the appropriate place for laboring women, and a woman in bed offers ready access for interventions, an observation backed up by research. (Both Listening to Mothers surveys reported that few women were mobile after hospital admittance. In the first survey, two-thirds of the women gave as a reason that they were “connected to things” and more than one-quarter said they were “told not to walk around.”)Switching from a delivery bed in the center of the room to a large, low mattress with several pillows in the corner of the room was something that French obstetrician Michel Odent did when he became the head of the maternity department at Pithiviers, France in the 1970s:
In hospital birthing rooms I have visited personally, the bed is the central focus of the room. Even the flooring and ceiling materials emphasize the bed's central role in the drama to unfold: inlaid patterns around the bed circumscribe the area where birth is allowed to occur, and the spotlights on the ceiling further dictate the location of birth. These photos are from the new UIHC maternity wing in Iowa City, where I did my PhD. Notice the inlaid pattern in the flooring around the bed and the spotlights in the ceiling:
And these photos of my local hospital's LDRP rooms. Again, notice the inlaid pattern in the flooring that outlines and emphasizes the centrality of the bed. The room revolves around the bed: the couch and rocking chair face it, the monitoring equipment surrounds it, and the lights focus on it:
Should we cover ED drugs, fertility treatments so we can have octomoms everywhere, abortions, unlimited morning after pills, STD drugs handed out like candy, bariatric and lapband procedures, botox for "migranes", and the lists goes on and on....Are we going to pay for at home birth in mobile tub clinics?
Napping with grandpa
I noticed how women were stunned by how drastically different the world looked when they were pregnant: how it changed the entire landscape of their lives. It was as if they were starting life anew. I took that element and tried to apply it to my predicament, so that when I had no idea what to do next, I made an effort to comfort myself in the open range of possibilities. In the laboring mother, I witnessed how her pain was inescapable and raw and overtook her entire being. I saw her writhe in agony, breathe through tremendous difficulty, somehow make peace with her situation, surrender to the process, and face her deepest truth as she brought forth new life. Most remarkably, I saw women reach deep inside and access a warrior-like internal strength beyond compare. Every birth inspired me to reflect on the power and wisdom women possess, and to have faith in my own inner fortitude. I marveled at the natural process unfolding for women as they let go without self-judgment. I observed how they hurt more if they became scared, and seemed more at peace with their pain when they accepted it. I learned from them that there was pain with purpose, and that we can make it through the most horrific, mind-numbing, excruciating pain, even though we sometimes think we can't. In the end there is triumph, joy, and empowerment beyond imagination.In a Lifeless Birth, a Midwife’s Opened Eyes is a heartwrenching story in The New York Times about a new midwife, called to attend a birth of a baby who had recently died in utero. She learned how to face death, rather than pretend it did not exist, from a more experienced midwife.
Not sure what else to do, I filled the silent birth room with the sound of my own voice. I told her all about my training in midwifery, my hometown, my likes and dislikes. I learned that she was a graduate student in crop management, that she grew up in Ohio, that we both liked a movie that had come out the week before.In Delivering Affordable Health Care, Miriam Perez (who blogs at Radical Doula) explains why midwives offer a cost-effective solution to rising health care costs.
The time dragged, the monitor spewed forth paper, and I kept chattering. I remember that I was proud of myself for coping with this difficult situation with diplomacy and tact.
I had been there for several hours when Barb arrived in a burst of energy. She wore faded jeans and flip-flops. Her jade earrings swung at the side of her neck. She threw her arms around the patient, hugged her a long minute, and then said, “I’m so sorry.”
My patient collapsed into uncontrollable tears. Barb sat on the edge of the bed, her hand on the patient’s arm, and they spoke in halting, slow, tearful words about the awful momentousness of what was happening. I sat in my chair in silent shock.
Death had been in the room but had been nicely hidden under the sheets, under our cheerful demeanor, under the silences of things left unsaid.
Washington, one of the first states to license CPMs, now has an out-of-hospital birth rate twice the national average and has seen these claims of cost effectiveness come true. The most recent Department of Health cost-benefit analysis showed that licensed midwifery care in Washington saves the state $3.1 million every two years in Medicaid costs.
In The Big Push: Birmingham hosts national midwifery conference, Jesse Chambers discusses past and present legislative efforts to legalize and license direct-entry midwifery in the U.S. I love the poster!“What our state advocates are facing in their respective statehouses are these nearly surreal David vs. Goliath situations,” Hedenkamp says. “We’re talking about moms and dads wearing their tires bald driving hours and hours to the capitols and home again in order to do advocacy with policymakers on even less than a shoestring.”And finally, an oral history video about midwife Anna Grier. Betty Sue Gunthrope speaks to the influence of early twentieth century midwife, Anna Grier and the role of African American women as frontline health providers.
On the other side, she says, are well-funded lobbies such as the American Medical Association (AMA). “Since the Big Push for Midwives Campaign began, we have organizing the grassroots together in order to stand up to these very well-financed opposition forces,” Hedenkamp says. She is able to cite at least a few states where the midwifery movement has had some success, including Idaho, where a bill was passed this spring to legalize CPMs.
He has set out his controversial views in an article for the journal Evidence Based Midwifery, which is published by the Royal College of Midwives (RCM). In a sharply worded critique of the rising popularity of pain-free labour, Walsh warns that normal birth is in danger of being "effectively anaesthetised by the epidural epidemic" in the NHS. A widespread "antipathy to childbirth pain" has emerged in the past 20 years and combined with increased patient rights and risk-averse doctors to create a situation where almost all hospitals now offer epidurals on demand, even if that is not in the mother's or baby's interests.It sure sounds like those quotes are coming from the article, right? But they aren't, and the article doesn't yet exist.
SO, big dumb MALE midwife versus women just trying to do the best they can to cope with horrible pain, right? No. Not at all. Denis Walsh has made it his mission to write about and try to put into practice good, well-designed midwifery and obstetric research, with a particular emphasis on respect for the woman as a dignified person in a highly vulnerable and difficult circumstance. I know this because–in preparation for a second delivery, of which I was formerly shitless on account of a *terrible* first–I happen to have recently read Walsh’s midwifery text Evidence-Based Care for Normal Labour and Birth. Here is a brief run-down of what I took from his text wrt epidurals:
* epidurals interfere with, slow, and generally throw off the body’s efforts at expelling the fetus, thus greatly increasing the instance of assisted delivery. (For those not in the know, “assisted delivery” means they slice into your genitals with a sharp knife and then shove heavy metal tongs up your vagina to yank the baby out. It is not fun, and even if it’s “simple” (as you’ll hear in the interview linked below), it is certainly not nice–nor are the lasting pain and disfigurement caused by it. And charmingly, in many instances of use (take my experience, for example) it doesn’t even seem to be medically indicated.)
* Midwives (a) have in some delivery ward contexts become so accustomed to routine intervention and pain relief that they’ve simply lost the ability to accurately judge ‘how it’s going’: they see a woman screaming in labour pain and think something’s gone wrong, when in fact she’s simply in labour. Because of this, midwives are quite often quick to try to “fix” the situation by offering epidural; (b) are sometimes simply not willing to take part in helping women to manage pain; in a nutshell, they simply don’t like putting up with screaming patients; and so they like for their patients to receive epidural as quickly as possible.
* Childbirth is a frightening experience, especially for women who aren’t well-educated about it, and as such, midwives tend to influence very heavily what decisions women make for themselves in childbirth.
I continued to have Jeremy rub my shoulders, and during this time, the contractions started changing from strong and powerful to painful and purposeful. I said to Jeremy, "I have no idea how women transport to the hospital in active labor. You could not pay me enough to get me down those stairs and into the car right now."At the end of her birth story, Emily compared and contrasted her emotional experiences of giving birth. You don't have to have a candle-lit, romantic birth with Enya playing in the background for birth to be amazing and perfect. It can be raw and painful and overwhelming and even a bit scary in parts--and still be wonderful and just what it needed to be.
It is an interesting and indescribable sensation, transition contractions. It is usually at that stage most women have the feeling that they can't go on, and often the stage at which women begin begging for pain medications. Now, it can be very painful during that time, but more often, it is so purposeful that it feels overwhelming. It triggers the feeling of action - that you need to DO something. If you are at home, and have freedom of movement, it is easy enough to listen to that feeling. I can imagine that for women in the hospital (as it was for me in previous births), being strapped into a bed at that moment would be frightening and create a "caged animal" feeling. Well, in my case, they were definitely painful. I knew now was the time to just hang on and relax, and try my best to get through the contractions until it was time to push, which I also knew would not be long, if I was in transition.
I couldn't have asked for a better birth. In a way, emotionally this birth wasn't much different from my hospital births. I had always ignored the staff around me and done my own thing anyway, so I already felt very confident in listening to my body. But the difference was NO HASSLE. No needles, tubes, machines that go Ping!, nurses, doctors, strangers, vitals, meds, beds, smells, stupid questions or irritating orders.
For a long time after Ruby's birth, I felt as if I did everything "wrong." The labor was fast, it was painful, I made a ton of noise, and nothing about it seemed particularly spiritual or life-changing. I had none of the usual cultural rituals surrounding childbirth, such as going-home outfits, footprint certificates, or official visitors. And on top of all that, I could not share my birth story with anyone without getting that, "Are you crazy???" look. It is a sad statement on the state of birth culture in our country when a woman who births naturally, in her own environment, following her human instinct, surrounded by her loved ones, is considered the weirdo.
In any case, it has taken me a good while to understand that a birth experience doesn't have to be anything but what you want it to be. My birth doesn't have to be new-age-y, magical, ethereal or painless for it to be meaningful, and it doesn't have to be supervised, technological, or professionally observed to be safe and successful. In other words, my birth was exactly what it needed to be for me: normal.
Up until about the 30th week of my pregnancy I hadn't given labor much thought, only that I was going to ask for the epidural two days before contractions started. I'm not kidding, that was the extent of my birth plan. There was no need to experience any of the pain, I thought, especially since I had been through this before and I remember thinking that the pain was so awful that it was going to kill me. Give me the epidural and any other pain relief, maybe throw in a couple dozen shots of bourbon, oh and how about you just put me under general anesthesia and wake me up two days later. I'm not good with pain. I tend to complain and holler and call people regrettable things. It's like the Hulk, only he's on his period....There goes her world view, and then comes her first unmedicated birth this July, which she describes as "sacred and spiritual." I can't wait to read more about it. If she can ever actually makes it to the labor and birth parts!
But then out of no where the publishers of Ricki Lake and Abby Epstein's book Your Best Birth sent me a copy, just like the publishers of many books send me copies of other books all the time. Internet, I have rooms full of books that publishers have sent me. ROOMS FULL. And I was just about to toss this onto the mountainous pile of ones I'd eventually drop off at Goodwill when, I don't know, I flipped through a few pages and gave a full minute to one or two paragraphs. And those two paragraphs happened to be ones that really pissed me off. So much so that I read them aloud to Jon and said something like GOD, THOSE HIPPIES! or I BET THEY SMELL LIKE PATCHOULI!
You know, something totally open-minded.
Those paragraphs pissed me off so badly, in fact, that the one part of me that resembles my father the most — no, not the pointy chin or the metabolism or the absolute inability to watch a movie where everything goes wrong and the protagonist just keeps getting pummeled by life and I'm all MAKE IT STOP and then I have get up and actually leave the theater, no, none of those things — my righteous indignation, it flared up so magnificently that I sat down to read the whole book, just so that I could be angry at it. WHO DOES SHIT LIKE THIS? Me and Michael Hamilton, that's who. Both he and I will go to our graves filled with an inordinate amount of unproductive anger, but a smile will mark our faces because we will feel so justified. So RIGHT.
And then, oh God, the worst thing happened. And I didn't even see it coming, but I'm sitting there reading that book, gritting my teeth, shaking my head when all of a sudden it started to make sense. I started to see just how medicalized labor and birth have become in America AND THERE GOES MY WORLD VIEW.
Newman: How can providers who are already open and amenable to working with midwives help foster a more supportive culture among colleagues, as you suggest in the proposal?
Cheyney: One of the mechanisms for maintaining distrust between midwives and obstetricians is what my colleagues and I have termed “birth story telephone.” This is very similar to the childhood game of telephone where as the story spreads from one individual to another, it grows in nature and the details change substantially. As home and hospital birth stories are told and retold, and filtered through the lens of the teller, details shift to match the preconceived worldview of the teller. For example, a non-emergent transport for a slow, uncomplicated and non-progressive labor can turn into a mother laboring at home for days with poor heart tones and a uterine infection before the midwife reluctantly brings her in. By the time the story has been passed along, mother and baby who were actually never in danger were saved from a near death experience by the hospital staff.
Conversely, hospital births where a woman feels too many interventions were used can be constructed as abusive or traumatizing to the woman after numerous retellings. These stories effectively maintain the home/hospital divide. Physicians and midwives can work to overturn that divide by refusing to participate in “telephone,” by being committed to accuracy and professionalism; sharing only the stories they have first-hand knowledge of. Midwives and physicians who have positive experiences working with one another also need to speak up regarding those positive interactions.
Newman: What are some of the stereotypes or judgements held by midwives about OBs/physicians?
Cheyney: Let me begin with this caveat, midwives often hold fewer misconceptions about obstetricians because we actually get to see hospital deliveries when we transport. We have first-hand knowledge of the model of care that we often critique. However, very few physicians ever attend a home delivery, and yet feel very comfortable critiquing that option.
That said, because midwives often hear stories of hospital births from clients who are unhappy with the experience and are now seeking an alternative, many maintain an outdated view of hospital deliveries as inhumane and impersonal. The vast majority of women, about 70% in the United States, leave the hospital feeling it was a positive experience. Only about 30% leave with regrets or frustrations about their experience and treatment. We as midwives disproportionately serve that 30%. This can prevent us from seeing the work that obstetricians are doing to humanize and individualize birth in the hospital.
Finally, while obstetricians can envision a world without midwives, midwives cannot envision a world without obstetricians. Thus, midwives have a larger incentive to work towards positive relationships with back-up physicians.
Outcomes of 14,184 births from 2005, 2006, and 2007 were retrospectively analyzed to determine any impact of the change in an oxytocin protocol implemented in 2005. Patient characteristics were similar in all three calendar years.
The most profound changes were in emergency deliveries, including caesarean deliveries, vacuum deliveries (which dropped from 9.1% to 8.5%), and forceps deliveries (which fell from 4% to 2.3%).
The overall cesarean section rate remained unchanged, as did the rates of cord prolapse, preeclampsia, and abruption.
Dr. Ventolini cited a recent article in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology that suggests guidelines for oxytocin use, including avoidance of dose increases at intervals shorter than 30 minutes in most situations (Am. J. Obstet. Gynecol. 2009;200:35.e1-.e6).
Dr. Ventolini and his associates reported no financial conflicts of interest relevant to the study.
