Background: Standard guidelines recommend that delivery by caesarean section should be ideally initiated within 30 minutes of the decision to operate to avoid maternal and foetal compromise in labour. The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent to which these guidelines can be achieved in limited resource hospital.Methods: Authors used a secondary data from 330 patient's files of women who had a caesarean section from December 2013 retrospectively to January 2012.Results: The main indications for caesarean section was obstructed labour (18.5%) for mothers and foetal distress (6.4%). Though 74% of the mothers gave consent to be operated within the 30-minute guideline, only 3% were prepared for operation within this period. Only 24% of the caesarean sections were conducted within one hour after the decision was made for the operation. About 38% of the women, and 30% of the babies developed complications after the caesarean section.  Haemorrhage was the leading complication in mothers while the main complication for babies was babies with an Apgar score of 5 and below.Conclusions: The 30- minute recommended guideline for caesarean section was not achieved, and there was evidence of adverse post-operative outcome as a result of not meeting the global standards.

This was a retrospective case-control study of the determinants of choice of mode of deliveries at PCEA Kikuyu Hospital, Kenya. The aim of the study was to investigate the prevalence of SVD and caesarean deliveries and to determine the factors predictive of each mode of delivery. Data was analysed using SPSS 20.0. Descriptive analysis involving frequencies and percentages was employed as well as ANOVA test at 95% CI. The study has shown that 65.1% of women who delivered at PCEA Kikuyu hospital had Spontaneous vaginal deliveries (SVD), 7.71% elective caesarean deliveries while 26.78% had emergency caesarean deliveries. Parity, gravidity, employment status, previous modes of delivery and gestation age were found to be predictive of the modes of delivery (p<0.05). The study recommends that the hospital administrators and policy makers at the national and county levels should lay adequate plans for public awareness on the outcomes of modes of delivery based on the established rising rates of C/S deliveries. Finally, there is need for further research in other hospitals in different settings in order to ascertain the outcomes of different modes of delivery.