Day 568: The Birth Experience, Part 2: The Hospitals

First, I should explain the London Hospital, St. John and Elizabeth’s, is not public, it is private. The UK actually has a dual system. Not unlike our education system in the States, there are public schools which guarantee everyone a certain level of education, and then there are private schools which offer more enhanced and/or targeted services for those who have the means and desire. In short, if you are going to pay for your child to go to a private school you would also expect the private school to provide a standard that exceeds what you would get for free. Private healthcare providers in the UK understand and follow this model. I can only assume that St. John and Elizabeth’s exceeds what you can get from the public option, but it also far exceeds what you can get from the private options in the States… at least what we experienced with Grayson at Northside Hospital in Atlanta, aka, “The Baby Factory”.

Northside Hospital does, on average, over 50 births a day. At the close of 2005 Northside made national headlines for breaking the world record for the number of total births in one calendar year by a single hospital… the total was 18,331 births. Yet, strangely enough, just one month and ten days after breaking this record, when we arrived to Northside to have Grayson, we were assigned a nurse who had only attended one, previous, 100% unmediated natural, child birth.

To this day, I still find the ratios astounding. Northside has a 38.3% c-section rate and what, with a nurse at the busiest birthing hospital in the world having only attended one natural birth in her career I can only assume what Northsides natural v. medicated ratios are.

Now, I am not saying that St. John and Lizzy’s (as the locals call it) doesn’t do medicated births or c-sections, the birth center is attached to a hospital after all. But as you will discover over the course of my posts, the two hospitals behaved is complete different ways regarding implementation of policy in association with the wishes of the parents.

After all, women were having babies well before the invention of the “hospital”, right?