How does it Affect the Hospital Acute Care Service?
- Birth centers have had a major impact on humanizing the acute care maternity
services provided by hospitals. Note the rise in hospital birthing rooms, in privileges for nurse-midwives, in childbirth education programs, and in more liberal attitudes about family participation. - Birth centers are showing that the majority of women can safely proceed through pregnancy and birth using acute care services only as needed. In a wellness orientation to pregnancy and birth, birth centers would be the managed care gatekeepers for the acute care obstetric newborn services.
- Birth centers eventually will help to reduce the number of costly hospital beds and expand primary care services.
- Birth centers will help to reduce dependency fostered by institutional confinement and strengthen the family's ability to share responsibility for maternity care and family health.
- Birth centers will help to develop a system of care based first on the needs of the family and second on the needs of medical education or product promotion.
Hospitals and Birth Centers Working Together
"Families are much less reluctant to transfer to the hospital if they know the nurse-midwife with whom they have been working in labor will continue to manage their care and most likely attend the birth. There is more trust that their needs will be met and less fear that they will lose control."
-Susan Stapleton, CNM, MSN