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A Poll About Birth at Lehigh Valley Hospital

I’m going to do a bit of an informal poll on births at Lehigh Valley Hospital. Here is what I would like from you…please tell me about births that you have DIRECT knowledge of at Lehigh Valley Hospital in 2007, 2008, and 2009. That is, either you were at the birth, or you were told about the birth by someone who was at the birth.

What I would like to have is the year of the birth, the first name and last initial of the mother (this is so that I can make sure I’m not counting the same birth more than once), what baby this was for the mother, whether the primary care provider was a midwife or OB, and whether the birth was cesarean or vaginal. So that would look like this:

2007 Donna B first OB cesarean
2007 Jan H first midwife vaginal
2008 Renee C first OB vaginal
2009 Lynn D. second OB vaginal

I’m hoping to collect data on at least 200 births (and have gotten info on 25 so far on Facebook)…so…can you help me?

Thank you!

May 21:  An update on the stats so far….I have data now on 52 births.

Overall cesarean rate: 36.5%
Midwife cesarean rate: 16.0%
OB cesarean rate: 55.6%

Half of this data is from midwife attended births…but The Midwives attended less than 3% of births at LVH in 2008…so you can expect that LVH’s cesarean rate is much closer to the OB cesarean rate than the “overall” rate.  I will note that I suspect that there might be a bias in the OB data in that women who have a cesarean birth for their first baby and then were seeing The Midwives for a planned VBAC might be highly represented in the data set…yet another reason for me to want data on a LOT of births.

Tags: cesarean, hospital birth, Lehigh Valley Hospital, midwife