General methods for measuring and comparing medical interventions in childbirth: a framework

Background: The continue increase of interventions during labour in low risk population is a controversial issue of the current obstetric literature, given the lack of evidence demonstrating the benefits of unnecessary interventions for women or infants' health. This makes it important to have approaches to assess the burden of all medical interventions performed.

Methods: Exploiting the nature of childbirth intervention as a staged process, we proposed graphic representations allowing to generate alternative formulas for the simplest measures of the intervention intensity namely, the overall and type-specific treatment ratios. We applied the approach to quantify the change in interventions following a protocol termed Comprehensive Management (CM), using data from Robson classification, collected in a prospective longitudinal cohort study carried out at the Obstetric Unit of the Cà Granda Niguarda Hospital in Milan, Italy.

Results: Following CM a substantial reduction was observed in the Overall Treatment Ratio, as well as in the ratios for augmentation (amniotomy and synthetic oxytocin use) and for caesarean section ratio, without any increase in neonatal and maternal adverse outcomes. The key component of this reduction was the dramatic decline in the proportion of women progressing to augmentation, which resulted not only the most practiced intervention, but also the main door towards further treatments.

Conclusions: The proposed framework, once combined with Robson Classification, provides useful tools to make medical interventions performed during childbirth quantitatively measurable and comparable. The framework allowed to identifying the key components of interventions reduction following CM. In its turn, CM proved useful to reduce the number of medical interventions carried out during childbirth, without worsening neonatal and maternal outcomes.