Birth models of care and intervention rates: The impact of birth centres

Birth centres offer a midwifery-led model of care which supports a non-medicalised approach to childbirth. They are often reported as having low rates of birth intervention, however the precise impact is obscured because less disadvantaged mothers with less complex pregnancies, and who prefer and often select little intervention, are more likely to choose a birth centre. In this paper, we use a methodology that purges the impact of these selection effects and provides a causal interpretation of the impact of birth centres on intervention outcomes. Using administrative birth data on over 364,000 births in Australia’s most populous state between 2001 and 2012, we implement an instrumental variables framework to address confounding factors influencing choice of birth setting. We find that giving birth in a birth centre results in significantly lower probabilities of intervention, and that critically, this impact has been increasing over time. Our estimates are larger than those in existing studies, reflecting our newer data, diverging intervention rates across birth settings, and our accounting for important selection effects. The results emphasise the greater role of birth centres in delivering on policy priorities which include greater maternal autonomy, lower intervention rates, and lower health system costs.