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LETTERS: Gavin Young, Edmund Hey, Alison Macfarlane, Rona McCandlish, Rona Campbell, Geoffrey Chamberlain, and James Drife Choosing between home and hospital delivery BMJ 2000; 320: 798 [Full text]

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Correction

James Drife   (6 April 2000)

Correction 6 April 2000
James Drife, Professor of obstetrics and gynaecology Leeds Send response to journal: Re: Correction	Editor - There is an error in the second paragraph of my author's reply. The 22 deaths analysed in the 5th Annual Report of CESDI [1] occurred during 1994 and 1995, not in a single year. The number of births at home in this two-year period was 24,484 and using this denominator the risk is not 1 in 567, as I stated, but 1 in 1113. Not all of the 24,484 were planned home births, however, whereas all the 22 deaths were in planned home births. This is why the Report stated (p59) "a precise risk figure for an intrapartum death in a planned home delivery is likely to remain unattainable". My blushes would have been spared if the Report had given the "1 in 1113" figure along with a caveat that the risk is actually higher than this by an unknown amount. One other point emerged from my re-reading the Report: a further eight deaths at home were omitted from the analysis because there was no record of the intended place of delivery. Yours faithfully, James Drife 1. Confidential Enquiry into Stillbirths and Deaths in Infancy. 5th Annual Report. London: Maternal and Child Health Consortium, 1998.