Improving maternity care through TeamBirth
September 19, 2024—TeamBirth, an Ariadne Labs-designed program to improve patients’ birthing experiences and outcomes, is being implemented—and celebrated—in hospitals and birthing centers across the country.
Ariadne Labs—a joint center for health systems innovation at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Brigham and Women’s Hospital—launched TeamBirth in 2020. Under the program, from the time of admission through discharge, clinicians and patients continually huddle together to make and remake health care decisions.
In a September 16 Cleveland.com article about TeamBirth, Amber Weiseth, director of delivery decisions initiative at Ariadne Labs, explained that the program’s emphasis is on collaboration—“instead of, maybe your doctor and your nurse making decisions about you in the hallway. The decisions should be made at the bedside, with the person who’s in labor.”
“(Communication) is really hard, and it’s not sexy, it’s not some new tech, it’s not a checkbox, but it’s absolutely one of the critical foundational needs to provide safe health care,” she continued.
Ohio is one state where maternity care is improving thanks to TeamBirth. The Cleveland Clinic has been implementing the program at more and more of its hospitals, which have since seen drops in C-section rates and increases in reports of patient satisfaction.
More than a dozen birthing centers in New Jersey that have implemented TeamBirth have seen similar improvements. According to a September 16 NJ Spotlight News article about the program, 90% of patients who delivered babies under TeamBirth said that they felt involved in decisions about their care, were informed about options, and that their choices were listened to.
In particular, TeamBirth has been helping address the disproportionate rates of C-sections and dissatisfaction among Black patients. In New Jersey, Black women who were cared for through TeamBirth were 35% more likely to report feeling “empowered” compared to those who were not involved in the program.
According to Weiseth, anti-racism and implicit bias training for clinicians is a key aspect of the program. “These things should be done, but they’re not always done,” she told Cleveland.com. “We want to design solutions for every patient, every time, and we’re trying to close gaps in care by ensuring it doesn’t matter what you look like or where you’re from, that you get the highest level of care, just like anybody else would.”
Read the Cleveland.com article: ‘I felt heard’ – Cleveland hospitals embrace TeamBirth for collaborative maternity care
Read the NJ Spotlight News article: More NJ hospitals adopt team approach to improve birth outcomes
Image: credit: iStock/Oksana Kalmykova
