Midwifery, 1977

The Tucson nurse-midwifery service: The first four years

“…Of the 838 clients that nurse‐midwives followed to delivery, the nurse‐midwives were actually able to deliver 86%. This figure is comparable to the figures published for other nurse‐midwifery services 5–12 …”

Nurse-midwifery intrapartum management

“…Several researchers have compared outcomes of nurse‐midwifery and physician patient groups, usually for the purpose of evaluating the safety of nurse‐midwifery care. Common outcomes included a greater incidence of spontaneous vaginal deliveries and fewer operative deliveries, especially forceps deliveries, in the nurse‐midwifery patient groups 10‐13 . Other findings included less analgesia and a lower incidence of general or spinal anesthesia in those cared for by nurse‐midwives 10,13 …”

Investigation of institutional differences in primary cesarean birth rates

“…One explanation may be differences in the distribution of risk among women delivering at the two hospitals. Our previous work 28,29 indicates that this explanation is unlikely because there were no institutional differences in intrapartum risk scores and only small differences in prenatal risk scores, as measured by the Hobel risk‐scoring system, 32 a system shown to be applicable to both CNM and obstetric practices 34,35 . In addition, the higher rate of cesarean birth at TJUH persisted when measures of prenatal and intrapartum risk were added to the regression analysis.…”