Far from the delivery room

The number of births has been declining for years, and by no means a few. A matter of course, since the number of births is shrinking dramatically: just two decades ago it was hovering around 400,000 a year, now it is about 250,000. During the ongoing session of the Sejm on this issue, the Parliamentary Group on Patients' Rights met - and debated the problem at length. Long, but not necessarily constructively. The social side argues that it understands the need for changes in the model of perinatal care, resulting from demographics and economics. It is quite clear that it is impossible to maintain labor and delivery units in every county or city hospital - it would even be to the detriment of the safety of mothers and children.

It is also clear that the lion's share of parturients consciously choose a hospital and go to it - especially if it is far from where they live - early enough. However, there is something disturbing in the information provided during the meeting that in Podkarpacie, where there is no longer a single delivery room in parts of the province, some women rent apartments in Rzeszow, for example, which allows them to avoid stress in the last weeks before the birth. Experts, sharing the health ministry's argument, are probably also uncomfortable listening to such accounts - this is not how it should be.

The snag is that the Health Ministry is proposing solutions that are not really solutions. Certainly not the problems that uncoordinated closure or suspension of maternity wards can generate. From the beginning, the ministry has assured that there will be no births in so-called "birthing rooms" as a rule, because the goal is for women to give birth in labor wards.

There will not be any, especially since, as representatives of the ministry said at the Team's meeting, rooms are to be created nationwide in several. Not every hospital, eliminating a delivery room, will qualify to contract such a service. - We certainly don't want birth rooms to spring up like mushrooms, the meeting participants heard. The hospital will have to meet the minimum distance from the nearest maternity ward, have adequate facilities and, last but not least, a positive opinion from the provincial consultant.

That's not all, however. The hospital must also have the will to run such a birth room. This is not a bond, but an option. As Deputy Health Minister Katarzyna Kęcka said from the parliamentary stand on Thursday, no proposal to run a birth room has been received yet. This is, of course, an open matter, the regulations and orders on this issue have been in force for a short time. But hospitals will be calculating - not only the money, but also the risks of being responsible for a solution that is not quite tailored to the challenges of diluting the network of maternity wards. Or rather, with dilution, as the process is ongoing.