Adoption of Consensus Guidelines for Safe Prevention of the Primary Cesarean Delivery by Freestanding Birth Centers

Slow or arrested progress in labor is the most frequent (64%) indication for nonemergent transfer of laboring people from freestanding birth centers to the hospital. After the 2014 publication of the Consensus Statement on Safe Prevention of Primary Cesarean Delivery (Consensus Statement), many freestanding birth centers changed their clinical practice guidelines to allow more time for active labor in the birth center prior to hospital transfer. The result of these changes has not been evaluated in birth centers. Evaluation of adoption of guidelines based on the Consensus Statement in hospitals has shown inconsistent results.

Birth centers were contacted to determine whether they changed clinical practice guidelines in response to the Consensus Statement. A before-after analysis compared outcomes for the 2 calendar years before and the 2 calendar years after adoption of new guidelines with a retrospective analysis of deidentified client-level data collected in the American Association of Birth Centers Perinatal Data Registry.

A third of responding birth centers (11 of 33) changed their clinical practice guidelines, mostly redefining the onset of active labor as beginning at 6 cm cervical dilatation and allowing 4 hours of arrest of dilatation in active labor before transfer to the hospital. These changes were associated with fewer diagnoses of prolonged first stage of labor (13.8% vs 8.0%, P < .01) but not with fewer intrapartum transfers (14.0% vs 14.7%, P = .55) or cesarean births (5.0 vs 4.1%, P = .26.) DISCUSSION: We found no evidence that making these practice changes was associated with better outcomes. Two hours of a lack of documented cervical change in active labor is likely long enough to diagnose arrested progress in labor. Research on proportion of morbidity and mortality associated with prolonged labor could inform practice guidelines for transfers.