By Jennifer Warren
Gone are the drips, the dials, the cold metallic beds. North Shore University Hospital at Forest Hills followed a national trend toward home birthing last Thursday when it announced the opening of its New Life Center on the Forest Hills campus.
The delivery rooms are styled with dark walnut cabinets, soft overhead lights and walls awash with tulip landscapes but remain staffed with specialized doctors and all necessary medical equipment on hand.
“It’s a beautiful homelike environment but with all of the most sophisticated technology hidden behind the cabinets,” said Dr. Vicki Seltzer, the vice president of women’s health services during a tour of the new unit. If a medical crisis should occur, it can be addressed “at a moment’s notice,” she said.
The center is home to seven easy-on-the-eye labor and delivery rooms and by the end of the summer state-of-the-art nursery and postpartum rooms. While the medical equipment has changed little, the environment is newly designed to feel less clinical, less sterile.
Barbara Schofield of the Elizabeth Seton Childbearing Center in Manhattan said many hospitals are implementing more visually soothing labor rooms but the changes are largely cosmetic.
“They put the pretty wallpaper up, but they don’t change the care,” Schofield said. “Some hospitals are putting in real changes, others are not. If it’s pretty, it makes it appealing on the tour, but it doesn’t change the family-making process and the experience for women,” Schofield said.
Home births and birth centers like the Elizabeth Seton Center are often staffed by nurses with advanced degrees in midwifery rather than doctors. The patients are constantly monitored and if problems arise are transferred to hospitals, but emergencies are rare.
Catherine Clark, Elizabeth Seton’s clinical director estimated that less than 2 percent of the 246 babies delivered at the center were transferred due to emergency complications.
The practice of home or non-hospital births however, are not a practice that North Shore’s Seltzer recommends.
“I don’t personally think home birth is ideal. You think things are going fine, wonderful, and safe. But things can also go very wrong in a matter of seconds,” she said.
Seltzer estimated between 10 percent to 20 percent of delivering mothers experience some form of complication during labor. The mother’s blood pressure could drop, the fetal heart rate could suddenly slow, any number of situations could arise, she said .
The hospital also announced the arrival of new staff members including Dr. Peter Hong, the chief of the obstetrics unit, and Camille D’Amato the head of obstetrics nursing.
Borough President Claire Shulman, who was on hand for a tour of the new center, cradled one of its recent deliveries, four-week old Logan O’Connor.
“I’m holding the baby and I’m not even running for office. How do you like that?” she said to a roomful of photographers.
Citing census findings that Queens’ population has topped 2 million, Shulman instructed the hospital staff accordingly: “At 2.2 million we need as good health care as possible for the people who live here.
“But don’t deliver too many,” she said. “I’m a little short of school seats.”
Reach reporter Jennifer Warren by e-mail at Timesledgr@aol.com or call 229-0300, Ext. 155.
