Adverse outcomes of (post-)term births and differences in professional organisational contexts: an integral descriptive system approach

Abstract

Objective: The development and application of an integral descriptive model for monitoring and evaluation of patient flows and adverse outcomes of childbirth related to distinct categories of professional organisational contexts.Setting: After categorisation of the individual professional contexts in which deliveries take place, the resulting framework has been superimposed on the 2002-2010 database of the Netherlands Perinatal Registry.Participants: All Dutch hospitals and almost all first-line midwife practices recorded 1 469 955 (post-)term births from which only the patients with a spontaneous onset of labour (n=1 120 508) were included in a study on the quality of obstetric care outside office hours. Main outcome measures:For the performance of professional organisational contexts the difference in relative incidence of perinatal death or Apgar score <7 between the related patient groups and the reference patient groups has been used. These differences have been expressed as risk ratio (RR) with a 95% CI.