In response to the demand for information about the "normality of childbirth" BirthChoiceUK produced a "normal birth rate" for individual maternity units in the UK for 2001 and 2002. For 2003, The Department of Health itself responded to this consumer demand and included normal birth rates in its published statistics for England. The Maternity Statistics Bulletin is now produced by the Information Centre for Health and Social Care and normal birth rates for England continue to be published by them as 'normal delivery rates'.
A "normal birth" has been defined as one which starts naturally and does not involve any medical or technological intervention. This definition would therefore exclude births which involve induction, acceleration, medical pain relief (including epidurals), forceps, ventouse, a Caesarean or an episiotomy.30
Because of the way maternity statistics are compiled - measuring rates of intervention rather than rates of "non-intervention" - it was not possible to calculate the rates of normal birth using this strict definition.
BirthChoiceUK was however able, with the help of the Department of Health Statistics Division, to develop a method of calculating the proportion of women who:-
For further details of how the BirthChoiceUK normal birth rate for 2001 and 2002 was calculated from Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) records please click here.
We were aware at the time that this definition of normal birth had its shortcomings. In particular, due to limitations in the collection of data, we were unable to exclude women who had augmentation of labour and therefore the inclusion of this intervention resulted in an over-estimate of the normal birth rate which we are still unable to quantify.
Also included in the BirthChoiceUK normal birth rate for 2001 and 2002 were women who had episiotomies, as only limited data were available. Again this inclusion resulted in a further over-estimate of the normal birth rate which we calculated to be less than 3%. (Further analysis by the Information Centre in 2007 suggested that this over-estimate was likely to be less than 0.5%). The 'normal delivery rate' produced by the Information Centre now takes account of women who had episiotomies so these women are not included as having had a normal birth.
BirthChoiceUK worked closely with The Department of Health Statistics Division (3G) to produce these statistics for England for 2001 and 2002. We are grateful to Lesz Lancucki and Mary Grinsted for their help and for including normal birth rates for 2003 onwards in their published statistics. Our thanks are also due to ISD, Scotland for preparing the Scottish normal birth rates for us in 2001 and 2002 and for continuing years..
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Or to find out more about normal birth, visit the Normal Birth Pages on BirthChoiceUK Professional.