2017 Stats!
Over the course of the 2017 year, Foundations Doulas spent 364 hours supporting families during their birth experience.
This averages out to 12 hours for the primiparous or first time birthers, and 7.5 hours with the multiparous or second, third, fourth etc birther.
Or another way to look at it is, we spent 15 whole days in labour!
24 hour long days that is….
Of course we can’t track the texting and phone calls for all the lead up, “maybe labour” activity. And then there was the 250+ hours of meetings and visits. Doula hours are a little hard to quantify and count, but for 2017 it looks like we spent an average of between 16 & 20 hours with each of our families.
Our birthers collectively spent 517 hours in labour, with an average of 17 hours for the first timers and 11 for everyone else. That works out to 21.5 days of labour in total. These numbers reflect a whole lot of strength and perseverance!
Here are the Foundations Birth percentages for 2017:
28% SROM (spontaneous rupture of membranes) to start.
18% started with medical nudging
2.6% Belly Births (Caesarean)
97.4% Vaginal Births
12% Epidural rate
100% VBAC rate (vaginal birth after cesarean)
8% arrived on their estimated due date
53% arrived after their estimated due date
39% arrived before their estimated due date
Recently the statistics for all of Canada came out for 2016/2017.
Here are what some of those numbers look like:
28.2% Belly Births (Caesarean)
58.6% Epidural rate
7.9% arrived before 37 weeks gestation
And narrowing it down here is what those numbers look like in Manitoba:
23.4% Belly Births (Caesarean)
39% Epidural rate – ranging from around 31% in the Southern Health region to 44% in the Winnipeg Region
28.5% VBAC rate
8.5% arrived before 37 weeks gestation
10% of Manitoba births were assisted by either forceps or vacuum extraction
Interestingly Caesarean section was the most common inpatient surgical procedure in Canadian hospitals, and giving birth remains the most common reason for hospitalization in our country. The average stay being 2.3 days. Imagine how significantly our healthcare budget would shift if more people had access to a Birth Centre or had their baby at home?!?
There is a fairly wide range in the statistics across the country. For instance Saskatchewan had a Caesarean birth rate of 19.6% while in BC 35.3% of births were Caesarean. Looking over the numbers it seems that Saskatchewan has a higher rate of instrument assisted vaginal births, so perhaps this contributes to their lower belly birth rates? Only 13.4% of the vaginal births in the Northwest Territories included epidural anesthesia, compared to 72.1% in Quebec. That seems like a really wide range, I am so curious as to what influences both of those numbers!
So there you have it, numbers and stats from us, the province and the Country. Now to catch up on 2018 Birth Stories!
Here is the link to the Canadian stats if you want to look at them more closely: CIHI
~Tarana~
