Published 20 April 2009, doi:10.1136/bmj.b1616
Cite this as: BMJ 2009;338:b1616

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Home birth as safe as in hospital for low risk women, study shows

Helen MacDonald

1 BMJ

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Home birth is as safe as hospital birth for women at low risk, according to the results of a Dutch cohort study of 529 688 women. But the authors say that a prospective study is needed (British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology 2009;116:1-8).

"In our research, we studied more than half a million women in primary care and compared planned home births with planned hospital births," said the lead researcher Simone Buitendijk, head of the child health programme at the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research.

All low risk women, who gave birth between January 2000 and December 2006, were included. Just over 60% planned to give birth at home, 30.8% in hospital, and the rest did not specify. The researchers compared the risk of intrapartum death, neonatal death, and admission to neonatal intensive care, according to the women’s delivery plans.

"The number of babies that died or were . . . [Full text of this article]


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