The number of families choosing birth center and home birth midwifery care in the United States has been rising since 2004 1 and increased significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic. 2,3 There is growing recognition that wellintegrated community midwifery care could be one solution to improving poor outcomes and rising costs in our maternity care system. [4][5][6] At the same time, community birth outcomes are inconsistent, and data are unreliable in most states. [7][8][9][10] Additionally, few practices or organizations have mechanisms for changing midwifery practices and systems based on outcomes and feedback from birthing people. These conditions provide a great opportunity for midwifery organizations and perinatal collaboratives to study existing models, evaluate innovations, and implement community birth quality improvement (QI). Now is the time for our organizations to build data collection and continual QI into the fabric of community midwifery.Like all perinatal care providers, community midwives are highly motivated to provide safe, quality care to birthing families. Unlike hospital-based providers, however, most community midwives are not part of a structured, data-driven, QI program. Although there is extensive guidance for QI in hospitals, little guidance exists for community birth settings, where midwives work in small practices of 1 to 10 providers. This small scale means that community birth practices may have limited resources for QI, and many QI models are not appropriate to their size. Community midwife-specific QI programs in national and state midwifery organizations, birth center organizations, and state or regional perinatal quality collaboratives (PQCs) are needed to bridge current gaps and bring community midwifery into meaningful efforts to continually improve care for birthing families. In this commentary, we share models for QI in community birth to inspire midwifery and perinatal organizations to take action (Figure 1).
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Copyright © 2025 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.