Home birth study ‘quite misleading’

A CONTROVERSIAL home birth safety study conducted by two top Irish physicians has been torn to shreds in an article published in a British scientific midwifery journal.

A critical review of the study that appeared in the latest issue of MIDRS Midwifery Digest described it as “deeply skewed and quite misleading”.

The study by Peter McKenna, former master of the Rotunda Hospital, and Prof Tom Matthews, a paediatric consultant based in the maternity hospital, compared home and hospital deliveries in the Eastern region.

Their work, published in the Irish Medical Journal last September, concluded that the chances of a normally formed baby dying during in labour is one in 3,600 if it was born in hospital and one in 70 if it was born at home.

Their findings were based on a reported 17 deaths in the three Dublin maternity hospitals and five deaths attributed to births in the community.

One of the authors of the critique, Dr Krysia Lynch-Rybaczuk, an information systems analyst at Trinity College Dublin, said the study grossly under-represented the number of hospital deaths in the main Dublin maternity hospitals from 1999-2001.

“A close examination of the hospital reports used by McKenna and Matthews shows that the true hospital death count is 132, not 17,” said Ms Lynch-Rybaczuk, who is spokeswoman for the Home Birth Association of Ireland. “The five deaths in the community were not related to place of birth; these outcomes would have been the same in hospital.” The review pointed out that four of the five deaths attributed to home births were wrongly categorised in the study.