Safety statements for 19 maternity units published

The first monthly safety statements published for all 19 of the country’s maternity units show widely differing levels of births by caesarian section as well as perinatal mortality rates.

While Dublin’s National Maternity Hospital (NMH) and Cork University Maternity Hospital (CUMH) had relatively similar numbers of total births in December at 780 and 676 respectively, CUMH had a caesarean section rate of 34.4% compared to a rate of 26.9 for NMH.

And while CUMH had a perinatal (stillborn and early newborn) mortality rate of 4.5 per 1,000 total births, NMH’s rate was zero.